So, as often happens in our class, Tom showed us the hard way to do something on Monday and then the easier way (supposedly) to do it on Tuesday.
Yesterday, we covered CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which is a language used to style web pages. Yesterday we struggled through copying a web page and today we were shown methods to do it in an easier fashion: Grid and the Flexbox.
Styling is very difficult to do in HTML and I’m not totally sure why. Just to center something the way you want to can be a challenge. Some years ago, Twitter came out with a software called Bootstrap, which breaks down any web page into twelve columns allowing one to deal with the page piecemeal and have an easier time with positioning.
Grid and Flexbox are the next step in the simplification of CSS. Whereas you must (to my understanding) use twelve (or a factor of twelve) columns in BootStrap, you can set the number of columns you want to use with Grid. Grid helps you layout a whole page easier and Flexbox, it is said, makes it simpler to have like elements in the page spaced and centered in a way pleasing to the eye.
The monks of Tech Elevator did not find these two methods to be exactly as advertised.
For almost everyone in the class, it is our first day with this technology. But, to a man, we did not have much less trouble with today’s web page than we did with yesterday’s when we were “doing it the hard way.”
I suppose with time, these things will become easier. Tom said early and often that the best way to become good at CSS is to do a lot of it. Something tells me that’s about to happen whether we like it or not.
From Retail to Programming 