Ask HN: Best way to learn HTML and CSS for web design? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn HTML and CSS for web design?

#61

Post by SerLava » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 10:24 AM UTC

Not a designer but much of my job is styling web content and working with designers and devs. I'm paying for a couple months of "team tree house" which has pretty good videos, little quizzes, and a wysiwyg editor so can you follow along and code.

The videos spell things out nice and slow, sometimes a bit too slow but you can fast forward if you already know a section.

It's meant for web designers, so I'd imagine it would work for your friend. The site also has courses for a few web programming languages and Wordpress etc.

Anyone else used this?

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn HTML and CSS for web design?

#62

Post by EvanPlaice » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 3:40 AM UTC

dpapathanasiou wrote: post #3

sergiotapia wrote: post #2

http://htmldog.com - Hands down the best way to learn HTML and CSS. It's free! http://htmldog.com/guides/html/beginner/gettingstarted/ He will get context on what HTML is, and how it interacts with the browser. It's much easier to internalize knowledge with this website than it is elsewhere.

Great, thank you for the link.

w3schools.com

Keep the link as a reference but it also provides some good quizzes to learn and practice basic concepts. 8 years ago that's where I started learning HTML/CSS/PHP.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn HTML and CSS for web design?

#63

Post by jordanlev » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 5:44 PM UTC

abustamam wrote: post #58

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #55

Mid-level web student here. I've read several HTML/CSS books and gone through half a dozen courses. I'm comfortable with your basic HTML/CSS page, have a basic handle on Javascript (assuming I'm not doing anything more complicated than using getElementById to change some attributes on a click), and I can use jQuery/Bootstrap when I need to. Right now the biggest hump for me is figuring out how to make mobile-friendly…

The only thing you really need to know is how to use media queries. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Media_Queri... http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_rwd_mediaqueries.asp

It's not just about media queries... one also needs to understand the concept of "fluid layouts" -- that is, declaring your widths in percentages instead of pixels. Media queries can help tweak a design to change/respond to different screen widths, but the first step is making sure your widths are fluid and flexible (otherwise you'd basically need separate media queries for every single pixel from 300 to 1000).

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn HTML and CSS for web design?

#64

Post by mod » Wed, Feb 10, 2016, 4:19 AM UTC

baby wrote: post #42

Check https://thimble.mozilla.org/ Imo it is the best editor you can use to learn HTML and CSS.

That's pretty cool, but I couldn't use it as it doesn't support even basic keyboard movements like Ctrl + (right arrow).

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn HTML and CSS for web design?

#65

Post by trumbitta2 » Wed, Feb 10, 2016, 9:10 AM UTC

For all the "just go to W3Schools" people in this thread: http://www.w3fools.com/

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn HTML and CSS for web design?

#66

Post by Can_Not » Wed, Feb 10, 2016, 2:30 PM UTC

aerovistae wrote: post #37

dookahku wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say I'm already a competent programmer in C++/Python. would these also work out?

I have your background and am a front-end web developer now; that being said I looked it over and it looks like it covers most of the stuff you'll want to know, judging from map (table of contents). My only gripe on the subjects covered is that they do jQuery before JavaScript. But if you're already competent, then let me just tell you jQuery is just a JavaScript library a lot of websites use instead of "pure JS" bec…

> However, jQuery is largely considered very cumbersome by more experienced devs, owing to being slow in performance and to being a large file include that slows page load times, and a lot of people try to avoid it for that reason.

I whole heartedly disagree. Experienced devs consider jQuery a tool and know when to use smaller frameworks like vanillaJS or something heavier such as React/Aurelia. Also, in terms of web libraries/frameworks, 100kb is not that big.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn HTML and CSS for web design?

#67

Post by baby » Fri, Feb 12, 2016, 7:48 PM UTC

mod wrote: post #64

baby wrote: post #42

Check https://thimble.mozilla.org/ Imo it is the best editor you can use to learn HTML and CSS.

That's pretty cool, but I couldn't use it as it doesn't support even basic keyboard movements like Ctrl + (right arrow).

this is to learn rather than building an entire project. And I really advise you to try it more as you learn.

Also, are you on OSX? I never use Ctrl + → but rather emacs shortcuts like option + f, option + b, ...

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn HTML and CSS for web design?

#68

Post by mod » Sat, Feb 13, 2016, 12:13 AM UTC

baby wrote: post #67

mod wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty cool, but I couldn't use it as it doesn't support even basic keyboard movements like Ctrl + (right arrow).

this is to learn rather than building an entire project. And I really advise you to try it more as you learn. Also, are you on OSX? I never use Ctrl + → but rather emacs shortcuts like option + f, option + b, ...

I'm a professional coder, and I code in vim. I didn't expect the IDE to have vim bindings, so I didn't mention that, but I use the others in the command line or text fields in the browser, etc. Anywhere there's no vim bindings.