VIDEO: So web pages are composed of
HTML tags or more properly, elements.
DOUG LLOYD: Not exactly true.
But we spent about six or seven
hours on C. And we spent about six
to seven minutes on HTML.
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, perhaps.
But I don't think it really warrants
a whole lot of time in class.
I think we do spend time on what
it is, this interpreted language.
We explain to students that the browser
reads it top to bottom, left or right,
so to speak.
We find that it is the payload
that's transmitted via HTTP.
So all of the big picture items.
And then we dive in a
little deeper pointing out
the symmetry of most of the tags.
Open tags have close tags and so forth.
How attributes can extend
the definition of an element.
But once you have that basic vocabulary,
I'd liken it more to scratch.
Like once you understand
what the constructs are
and what the puzzle
pieces are that you have,
you can go figure out
how to assemble them.
And you can Google and
look at online references
to figure out what more
functionality the language has.
But for the most part, it's the concepts
that matter, I think, in the class.
DOUG LLOYD: Right.
And it's not all that intellectually
compelling like you said.
As a programming language, it's
not a programming language.
It doesn't have control flow.
It's really just markup.
DAVID MALAN: And we do introduce CSS.
And we do use this as an opportunity
to explain good design principles.
Albeit with very simple examples.
DOUG LLOYD: Abstracting away
the CSS files for example.
DAVID MALAN: Indeed,
you can embed it first
as a first pass with
your style attributes.
But that's a little
messy, as we point out.
And students start to realize.
And you've been at the top of your file.
But then it's not really
shared across multiple files.
And therefore can't be cached.
And so we use this as we do
many examples as an opportunity
to go from version 0 to
1 to 2, and so forth.
To get to a place that is the
right way to do something,
even though it's with fairly
small examples early on.
DOUG LLOYD: Both HTML and
CSS give us an opportunity
to indeed encourage students to
do that look up on their own.
Even though I've been programming
myself for a long time,
I still look up HTML tags and
what attributes I need to set.
To make things happen, I have
to look up CSS selectors.
DAVID MALAN: It's fun but it's not
that intellectually interesting.
DOUG LLOYD: Yeah, exactly.
DAVID MALAN: To store
all of that in your head.
And it's also changing too.
So we want students to be
going out and figuring out what
the latest is, especially with HTML 5.
There's still a lot of older information
where certain tags didn't exist.
And so getting that exposure is good.
And I think too, we want to
start to take training wheels off
at this point in the semester.
So that as students near
the end of the semester,
they're not completely beholden to
us for everything they're learning.
DOUG LLOYD: Right, they're feeling
empowered to find things and build
things that go far beyond the scope
of the class that we even teach.
DAVID MALAN: Exactly.
We'll sort of help explain the world
into which they were venturing.
But it's up to them to go find
what they need at that point.
Otherwise they're too dependent
on us by the time the term wraps.
DOUG LLOYD: Right.
