w7d3 - Divs everywhere
Today we took a step back from breaking our backs learning Backbone and strapped up our boots to learn Bootstrap! Witticism aside, it wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be, and it actually ended up being a pretty boring day, not because of bootstrap itself, it’s pretty amazing with all of the things that it allows you to do for “free”, but I think that’s part of what made it fairly uninteresting. We’ve gotten so used to building things from the ground up, having to painstakingly reset and then style each element on our pages, writing CSS line by line. At times it was tedious, but it was extremely rewarding to see what you were capable of doing by being consistent and programmatic. Bootstrap takes all of that away and allows you to pull off some pretty impressive styling by just adding a few classes to your elements. It looks amazing, but it sort of feels like cheating.
And don’t get me started on the divs! It felt like we were adding <div> tags left and right, with a few <span> tags sprinkled here and there. We’ve been taught to try to keep our HTML semantic, in other words, the meaning of your page should be fairly clear just from looking at the HTML. If you have different sections, use <section> tags to wrap each one, if you have articles, use <article> tags, if you have a list of navigation links, put them in an unordered list (<ul>) and wrap them in a <nav> tag. Sometimes you don’t have an exact semantic match for what you need, so it’s fine to use <div>s and <span>s occasionally, but they shouldn’t make up the bulk of your code, which it was it felt like using bootstrap. I know this isn’t a strict rule, but I think it helps a ton when writing, reading, and ultimately understanding HTML, which is a crucial piece of web development. Don’t get me wrong, I can see how useful Bootstrap would be for being able to quickly spit out great looking pages, but I guess I just prefer to have a little more involvement in the design process. But enough about Bootstrap…
It’s time to submit our proposals for final projects and I have been looking forward to this day very much. We will finally get to spend some time creating, writing, polishing and perfecting. We get to warm up by cloning Trello as a solo project over the next 2 days, a site I’m not really familiar with, but seems to be pretty cool, so I’m looking forward to that. Onward and upward!