While I had heard of pseudo-elements and pseudo-classes before, I have never used them or actually understood what it is that they do. This article is helpful in understanding just what it is and how they work, with the example of ::first-line having the ability to work like a span, but a responsive one. I appreciate the dynamic nature this gives elements, and is something I hope to use in the future. I think it is really interesting to see that the documents have the ability to identify things like p:first-child, not to assume that computers are stupid, but I know that it can run into issues when you do not put things in the right order in the CSS.

Another thing that the article taught me is the way that floated elements work in the flow. I had learned about the flow of CSS and its general ordering, but have not used float elements, so it is cool to see the way that it interacts with the other elements on the page. I also had not realized that items that are floated would be "out of flow."

One thing that I did not learn about at all last semester was an alternate box model. While we learned about the standard box model, an alternate never came up. I am still a bit confused about if any browser uses the alternate box model automatically, or if the alternate box model can only be applied to the page through CSS. I would be curious to see sites that use the alternate box model, as well as the relation of the box models in general to Swiss design grid concepts.

While this article was able to serve as mostly a review for me, as my Creative Computing class used CSS a good bit, I think that this article is still very helpful for understanding the basics of CSS. The other thing that I appreciated about this article was its introduction of DevTools. I had not heard of DevTools before, and it seems like a very helpful tool that may offer a bit more specificity and ease than the developer tools in Chrome or Safari. I also found the extensive information about the ordering of CSS to be something that would be very helpful for someone who had little CSS knowledge. Many CSS webpages offer a lot of various CSS properties and what they can be used for, but most of them do not offer an in-depth explanation of how CSS actually works. Rachel Andrew's article provides a better understanding of how to use CSS effectively. Different properties can be learned at any time just by knowing what each property does, but looking up properties won't teach you about the structuring of CSS.

Questions:

  -What are all the levels of selector specification? How specific can it become?