Suffering for Web Design; OR, It’s Hard Work to Be Cool These Days
Yesterday, I decided I was comfortable enough with beginners’ web coding to create a simple page that utilizes a javascript effect and some cascading style sheets guiding the layout. (Whoa! Geek alert.)
Here’s my final product: Spout. It’s really lame.
What’s sad is the fact that it took me about five hours to create such a lame final product. Cascading style sheets, called CSS by those in the know, frustrate me more than the phone company and the IRS combined. Their whole purpose is to allow for quick-loading web pages, and they definitely accomplish that, but I’m not sure how.
I understand their basic functioning, but when it comes to more advanced things, it’s a lot like my relationship with math — I could always do it (even calculus and whatnot), but I never truly understood it. What, for instance, is an integral? Limits? Imaginary numbers?
I’m the same way with most web coding and design issues. I can decipher, but I can’t really create. I simply copy parts of other sites I see and add my own content, like I did with that telescopictext thing (I made a new one, by the way). I also rely on people like “wolfcry911,” who helped me out on some CSS forum I posted to last night. After letting my inquiry sit for a while, I returned later to a solution given to me for free by someone I don’t know.
Forums for these sorts of things are really valuable since you try to keep CSS out of most conversations. You know what I’m saying? When Eileen got home last night, I was really cranky, pulling out my hair over my coding issues. She asked what was wrong, and I reluctantly confessed that I couldn’t get two divs to remain centered while also overlapping in my CSS.
For some reason, I don’t think she had much sympathy for me.
Read More