Majority of the time that I have spent coding I have usually used the styles tag within HTML. This is made be familiar with some of the things that the author was talking about in CSS, like "elements" and "classes". The first skill that I have discovered after reading this text that I did not know before is the pseudo-element. At first, I did not know what the author was saying but after reading the text a couple of times I realized that what this CSS element allows you to do is group all of your elements and as a whole manipulate them. The example that the text gave was that all the text was grouped and placed in a format where every word in each paragraph started off a new line, so it almost appeared as if you are looking at a long list. I have not had much trouble with “Inheritance and the Cascade” but knowing how DevTools actually works is very helpful. The second Skill that I have found out about during this reading is visually breaking down DevTools to its elements and what they mean and do. Before this reading I had no idea that when I was looking through my DevTools and I saw that something was crossed out it meant that that element had a hierarchy to it. I have always had issues with my DevTools and always felt pretty lost using them but after reading this information I feel like I am starting to get DevTools and what it has to offer. After finishing up reading about DevTools I moved on to the text titled “The Box Model”. In this part of the reading the author was discussing the concept behind how CSS heavily realize on this “Box” concept in order to move and space elements. The author dives a bit deeper and discusses margins, padding, and borders. All three of these are key aspects when it comes to spacing elements in CSS. Before reading this, I used to just use padding or margins not really knowing what they are or what their main purpose was, and this is why I would have such a difficult time arraigning all of my elements on my site. The third Skill that I learned while reading this text was the differences between borders, margins, and padding. Borders are obviously an element that allows you to wrap your elements with some kind of strip and you are free to style that strip how ever you want. Margins are the spaces outside of the borders. This indicates how much space you want between you borders and the next elements besides, under or above it. The last element in “The Box Model” that I learned about was the Padding element. This elements is the spacing between you content inside the borders and the borders itself. Like the rest of the elements that we have discussed here you are free to make that amount of spacing however big or small you want.
This reading was by far one of the most interesting readings I have ever done. The images that the artist created in this reading were amazing and they reminded me a lot of some of the effects and photography that’s being used in Music videos today. I really like the analogy the author used about Mountains and Rivers and how it was equated to websites in the sense that they are what they are, and they should be used or created to be used in a specific way. When I first read this, I was not very sure what the author was talking about but as soon as I saw the example of the apple website I started to laugh and totally realized what the author was saying. I used to think that those types of websites that were very over the top and almost cinematic looking were really cool but now I see how functionally these types of sites make no sense. One of the other main points that the author touched on was the “edge lessness” of websites. This topic was also very lost, on me until the author made the connection again between the artists photographs and websites. This idea “an edgeless surface of unknown proportions comprised of small, individual, and variable elements from multiple vantages assembled into a readable whole that documents a moment” really hit home for me and this concept the web being more than what’s in the screen on the your lab top but the fact that it’s an entire system linked together really opened my eyes. Some of the graphics used in this reading also really helped me understand this concept and I thought they looked pretty cool. I feel like this topic of the web being more than what’s on your screen is forgotten about by a lot of people. There are so many people myself, included who when they are on Facebook or Instagram think that they are in this other small realm that isn’t the internet but they are very wrong about that. This is something that people cannot forget about.