Introduction
After going through the first three WODs, I felt like I’ve learned quite a bit already as a beginner. I’ve learned to develop a webpage through VS Code and using html. I’ve learned how to format (somewhat) the webpage by changing the fonts and backgrounds and pictures through css. I’ve even learned how to make columns and a navigation bar through css as well. Overall, I feel like I’ve learned the some part of the basics of coding with html and css through these three WODs.
WOD #1: BrowserHistory1
To begin with, we’ve started up the server that we’ve made throughout a previous lab and made a webpage through VS Code that briefly told us the history about some of the history of web browsers. Originally, I thought I was doing fine when I started the assignment. I remembered how to get the emmet layout with ‘!’ and I knew how to put in the headings that were required. I also knew how to use the paragraph tags and how to section every part off. The part that confused me the most was the ‘table of contents’ part. I didn’t really know how to link each part of the table to each subheading, so I ended up having to use AI to figure it out. This took multiple tries and deleted recordings before I finally started to understand it. Afterwards, I watched the solution to see if there were any simplified ways to do what I was doing, but overall I think I did fine on the assignment other than on the ‘table of contents’. I’d give the advice of that it’s fine to search some things up, but sometimes searching things up will give you a very long explanation that could be simplified with some experimentation. I believe that some experimenting with the commands on your own time will help to solidify one’s understanding of using certain code.
WOD #2: BrowserHistory2
For this assignment, I had to link the html file to the css file so that the css file could format and style the web page. To be honest, I kind of struggled on most parts of this. It took a lot of trial and error to even figure out how to link the css to the html file before I looked at what we did in class beforehand to format the store webpage we’ve been working on. After that, it felt like everything was moderately easy in terms of changing the fonts and colors for the headings and the body, alongside the background. There was one part I was stuck on though other than the first part. I was a little bit confused on whether we were supposed to just use margin-right, margin-left, etc until I looked later at the solution to see that we could just use ‘margin’ and specified each dimension to change the dimension of the body. It only took a couple of tries before I got used to the commands and had a solid idea of how the functions worked. I think I did okay on the assignment, but I feel like I could’ve done better if I put in more effort. For advice, I believe that if you really wanted to get a deep understanding of how something works, investing the time to do the research and practice will help.
WOD #3: BrowserHistory3
Lastly, for the last assignment, I felt like this assignment was on the harder side out of the three WODs that were assigned. I understood how to add IDs to the sections and the formatting of the columns, but I got lost at re-formatting the ‘table of contents’. I had to remove the heading I had and I had to figure out how to use the ul tags with the nav tags. It took a lot of researching and using ChatGPT to figure out how it worked. I’m not proud of how long it took me to understand how the tags worked for this one if I had to be honest. After I got the navigation bar working after fixing up the css, I felt pretty proud of the finished product. I noticed, after looking at the solution, that I took very long for something moderately simple. To be brief, I believe that if you’re confused about something and try to search it up, it’s fine if you’re slow to understand. Everyone learns at their own pace for different subjects.
Summary
Overall, the WODs that we’ve done have helped me to get a better understanding of how to make and format a webpage. I’ve learned that it isn’t as easy as it looks, but with time, I can learn that, sometimes, it’s supposed to take time to understand how and why something worked. Just taking the time to do research and experimenting with some code will sometimes help to get an understanding of how the code may work and function.