Coding for Newbies
Breaking into the 21st century's most valuable career skill
PRESENTER
KHURRAM VIRANI
@viranik
Co-founder, Lighthouse Labs
Co-founder, Functional Imperative
What is coding?
And what does it mean to be a coder?
CODING IN REAL LIFE VS MOVIES
Where does HTML come in?
How does it compare to CSS ?
How do we write code?
LET'S TAKE A LOOK AT BRACKETS
How are Webpages built?
boxes, little boxes on the hillside
How does HTML work?
<>
These are called angle brackets
Text inside of angle brackets is an HTML tag.
Everything else is just text.
Boxes are called Elements
<p>This is normal text surrounded by HTML tags .</p>
Note how the closing tag has a forward slash.
This forms a paragraph Element .
Let's pick apart SOME CODE
<h1>Khurram Virani</h1>
<p>
<em>Bio:</em> Co-founder of Lighthouse Labs
<br>
<em>E-mail:</em> khurram@lighthouselabs.ca
</p>
<h1>
: Defines a "heading 1' with large text.
<p>
: Creates a paragraph of text.
<em>: Emphasizes text (e.g. italicize it).
<br>
: Triggers a new line.
There are many types of HTML elements, including:
<SECTION>, <HEADER>, <STRONG>, <FOOTER>
EACH ELEMENT HAS ITS OWN SPECIFIC ROLE
cool ...
We've learned about tags and elements.
WHAT'S NEXT?
Nesting: CODE INSIDE OF CODE
Place an HTML element inside another HTML element.
Previously, our <em> tags were inside our <p> tag.
Shapes how the resulting web page is structured.
Attributes
Attributes give elements superpowers
additional information.
Attributes
Attributes are placed inside an element's opening tag.
They are placed after the tag's name.
They are structured as follows: attribute="value"
ATTRIBUTE EXAMPLE
Here's a normal header element:
<header>I'm a sentence.</header>
Here's a header element with a title attribute:
<header title="My Cool Header">I'm a sentence.</header>
SRC
Attribute
The
src
attribute is how we get
CAT PICTURES
Used within the
<img>
element
<img
src="
http://images.com/cute_kitten_charlie.jpg">
HTML defines the elements on a webpage
CSS defines the design of those elements.
Structure: Our house's scaffolding.
Defining block of content that should go within another block, etc.
Design: Our house's paint and decor.
How those blocks should actually look:
what colour they are, how big they are, etc.
CSS is a two-step process
1. It targets an element on a page.
2. It applies styles ("properties") to it.
Common CSS properties include:
color, font-size, text-align
NOW LET'S CREATE THE CSS
CSS consists of rules. CSS rules are simple:
header {
color: green;
}
Just like with HTML attributes, we simply assign values to properties.
DIVING DEEPER INTO THE CSS
header { <---- Opening curly bracket.
text-align: center; <---- We use ":" instead of "=".
color: green; <---- We don't put the value inside quotes.
} <---- Closing curly bracket.
em { <---- We're targeting all emphasized text on the page.
font-size:
20; <---- Then we're telling CSS how to style the font-size property.
color: blue;
}
We place groups of CSS rules one after another.
identifying elements
Problem: Targeting a specific element
Use an HTML attribute that assigns it a unique name.
The attribute that does this is called id.
Should be unique to the page.
<p id="welcome">Welcome to my webpage.</p>
In CSS we can now target that element using #
#welcome {
font-size:
20;
color: blue;
}
PROBLEM: TARGETING ALL CAT IMAGES!
SOLUTION: classify them!
Use another HTML attribute that assigns it a common name.
The attribute that does this is called class.
<img src="kitten.jpg" class="cat">
<img src="tony_the_tiger.jpg" class="cat">
In
CSS
we can now target that element using
. (a period)
What else can you do with css?
tons more