I settled on my next step for the Learn to Code LA meetup website: the stylesheet. I’m just going to pretend that the content is done (even though it isn’t) and start making the website, because that’s the part I need to practice.
My goal for today: start creating the website and compile a list of all the things I don’t know about making stylesheets.
First, I deleted all the CSS from the stylesheet to start with a blank slate:
Ugly, isn’t it? It still has some styles applied to it though, because every web browser has some default CSS. Actually, this is a topic I really want to learn more about: the guts of the web browser and the nitty gritty details of how CSS is implemented. But that’s for another day.
I remember reading about CSS resets a few years ago, back when I dabbled in freelance web design a tiny bit. The general idea is to undo all the browser-specific defaults so your design will be consistent across all web browsers. Read The History of CSS Resets for more than you ever wanted to know about the topic. (OK, I’ll be honest, I spent way too much time reading about CSS resets today because I was just curious about all the pedantic details and how it’s changed over the last few years.)
Today, Normalize.css is also super popular; instead of resetting all the CSS, it preserves browser defaults and makes them consistent.
Oh wow, I keep getting sidetracked and reading about CSS instead of writing any CSS of my own! I should probably follow along with some tutorial just to keep myself on track, like maybe this guide to creating a layout from scratch – oh, but it’s from 2006! In web dev years, that’s ancient!
Then I just wasted even more time searching for good tutorials without actually reading any of them. Oops. And somehow I ended up reading more about Jekyll and some of its more advanced features, which I really want an excuse to use! I’m not sure I can keep myself from falling down that rabbit hole.