Thank You The Iron Yard for the HTML\CSS Education

I drive a standard transmission car. It impresses people who don't realize how easy it gets. While there use to be real reasons to drive a stick, now my only justification is I doubt anyone can steal it. Why? You have to know to push the clutch down to start the car. It is so simple, but not obvious.

That is my best analogy to why I got so much out of the 90 minute class  "Free Crash Course - Intro to HTML\CSS" by The Iron Yard. I've updated dozens of HTML pages and a few CSS. I am no stranger to mark up languages. But honestly, I never had the guts to start one. And even if I did, I would often give up. Why? There were a few basics I just did not know I did not know.

Chris Davies and Kayt Hensley were great hosts and presented a fun, fast paced  session. He took a wikipedia page and showed us step by step on how to create it from scratch. I followed along an created a pretty funky page myself.

Here are a few things I learned: 

1. "Inspect Element" brings up a debugger the web page. I knew this but never "knew knew" this! It will change my life, I can tell already!
2.  Chris' secret to design: Draw it out with a thick marker, Make the HTML and then add some style. (Note: I expect signing up for their 12 week coding session would give you a few more secrets.)
3.  You can apply style for an html tag (ie all h1) or you can add it through a class= annotation to your html tags. (You can also do id= but Chris would be VERY disappointed if you do!) The class= gets added to the HTML and a period with the class name goes in your css.  What!?! I know, how easy is that!
4. The CSS is a simple language in the format of
   

   selectorName {
       property: value;
       property: value;
   }

5. Order matters but the rule of specificity matters more!
6. An 'em', pronounced "m" is the width of one "m" . Love the padding, love the margin! Shun the boarders!
7. Consider keeping text around 60 characters per line. 
8. Read about the Golden Ratio 
9. There are a lot of great sites like dribbble.com,  css-tricks.com, and lots of classes.
10. Chris Davies is an excellent teacher and The Iron Yard is doing some awesome work in Durham,NC 

Thanks!
Ginny

And for music? If CSS is the makeup of web pages, I can't think of a better song then RuPaul's Supermodel: