Class 3 of 15

Welcome to Day 3. Congratulations on making it past HTML. I promise that's the least fun part of this class (which means if you enjoyed HTML, then you're going to LOVE the rest of this class).

Oh, and we'll still be using HTML moving forward. We just won't be limited to HTML.


Our next topic is CSS, which stands for cascading style sheets. CSS brings sophisticated design to the web. We write CSS code to style our content, and we use CSS to create the layout for our pages.

CSS also lets us separate our content from our design, which has become valuable in recent years with the increase in the mobile web and apps. We can create our content once and apply different design to it depending on where we will display that content. The exact same HTML page can look different on a phone than it does on a tablet or a desktop.

Your reading for the next few days are chapters 3, 7, 13 and 14. Pay close attention to chapter 3, which introduces you to CSS. It's important that you understand the role of external, internal and inline stylesheets.

Homework (due at 11 p.m. Wednesday, May 30):

Once you are done, download and begin this CSS worksheet (Here are the css-site files you will need to complete the worksheet). You don't have to get through the whole thing yet, as some of it applies to tomorrow's lesson. Ideally, you will get through step 17.

More importantly, make sure you do these steps slowly so you can get a sense of what each step is truly doing to the design of your page. If you race to get done, you likely won't learn. And we're here to learn!

As usual, send any questions to chris.snider@drake.edu.

Useful link:
W3Schools CSS tutorial