Today is week 2, in other words it is a new semester and last week we had some things to do. Aside from getting used to back at school, we are currently playing around with some of the CSS frameworks. In short, they make styling a web page by only requiring the developer to change the class tags. Some of them are opinionated, but some others are closely named with the CSS names. We were given a few frameworks and had to first play and test them, and then change the website that was for last term’s assignment.

The first part of looking at the frameworks was relatively easy, I just looked at their docs and the examples provided. The frameworks that we were given were: Bootstrap, Materialize, and Tailwind. They all had their purpose and differences, the first one being Bootstrap is one of the most popular ones that can be used and has pre-made components that can be used, the second one which was Materialize is basically making Google’s Material Design easily usable for web (this means that it is opinionated in terms of styling), and the newest one being Tailwind requires some creativity to use because it is basic in nature (requires you to explicitly state what things should look like - like CSS)

The next part where I had to change my website I haven’t done yet because time and how much styled it is, currently it has lots of lines of CSS and changing it to something else would be hard (Tailwind would be the easiest I think). But that is what the plan for next week…

I believe the reason that we are learning about CSS (and more specifically their frameworks) is because the teacher wants us to be-able to make an even better looking website then before. It should be better because these frameworks are designed to make pages look very good (also they spent hours on making it), at least better than hand making the CSS your self. As some time ago, the best strategy is simply trial and error, it is the easiest way to learn because if something doesn’t look right then you can fix it (or spend hours trying to find one small thing) and you learn from those errors. It is one of the reasons that I try to not follow tutorials for the whole thing (or use them at all) because they remove the fun out of trying to find the new things that can be done (tutorials give you code that you might not understand as well). My next steps (as stated earlier) is to continue to do the task and finish it, after that maybe do some more in my own time and then do the next task provided (because learning is good). Overall the CSS frameworks make an easier way to style a page, and simply easier in most circumstances.

TL;DR: New semester, continued learning about CSS. And will try to be better next week.