Journal #5: Reflections on the first 5 weeks of Web Design

I found the first five weeks of learning HTML and the very beginning of CSS to be interesting.  After spending some time with other languages, I thought HTML would have its similarities to programming languages I’m familiar with such as C++.  But, HTML is not a programming language.  It is a “mark up” language.  A programmer uses tags and attributes to define the structure of information to be interpreted by a web browser.  It doesn’t have conditional phrases such as “if / then /else.  It doesn’t handle events or carryout tasks.  But it’s great at what it does and with the addition of CSS that handles how the data is presented, these tools become very powerful in sending and receiving information instantly worldwide.

My experience has not helped me understand HTML but it has helped me better structure a document with indentations and comments.  CSS can be very helpful whereby you can create one CSS document to style multiple HTML documents.  What I’d like to also learn is how we can create one document with common text to be used on all documents such as headers and footers.

Of the assignments to date, I found the table exercises to be the more difficult ones.  It can get confusing when setting up rows and columns correctly.  I enjoyed working on assignments that use images such as the Tuscany one in Chapter 7.  Web pages change dramatically when you bring in images.