A Short Ramble on HTML and CSS

I’m not quite sure what to blog about this week, so I think I’ll just ramble a bit about the current class I’m taking and see where it leads.

              This class is Web Programming, and while it might not be “programming” or “coding” as one might think of it, we are working with HTML and CSS and building multi-page websites in text editors and Dreamweaver.

              I think I’m neutral about it. I don’t have any strong feelings one way or another. I don’t have a whole lot of passion or excitement for the projects, but I’m not dreading them, or filled with anxiety, or going into a crisis every 5 minutes because I don’t have the skillset for my ambition. It also seems like a weird class to end on, as far as my Graphic Design degree goes, but I think I’ll get into that next week.

              Overall, I don’t mind this class and I’m learning a lot – way more than I’ll ever retain! I actually enjoy the markup process of HTML. It must be the same part of my brain that enjoys designing forms. Going through text and marking what parts are headers, or paragraphs, or lists, is kind of relaxing in a way. It’s like organizing, editing, and solving an easy puzzle all at once. I’m used to going through large amounts of text (I do claim to be a writer, after all) just to find small pieces of things that need to be fixed. A couple of months ago I went through the entirety of the book I’m (still) working on (The Book of the Hidden: Inherent Nature), which is pushing 90,000 words, to highlight each character’s point of view in order to solve some issues. It only took a couple hours, and it was enormously helpful in deciding what needed to change or be removed altogether. I’m getting off track. My point was that I’m boring and I like working with text.

Creating styles with CSS can be a bit frustrating at times, if you’re trying to get something in a specific location and it just won’t go where you want and you don’t know how to find the tags for what you need. On top of that, I’ve found that I keep mixing left and right up. That seems like an awfully silly mistake to keep making, but it’s true. It’s not that I don’t know left from right, but I think my theatre brain is interfering. I’m sitting staring at the screen, with the screen staring back at me, and I’ve somehow subconsciously converted it into a 3D stage space. Now right is Stage Left and left is Stage Right, only I haven’t realized I’m thinking in stage terms and I write left when I mean House Right. At least up and down are the same.

Brains work in mysterious ways.

 

“It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.” J. R. R. Tolkien