Being a self-taught developer hobbyist, I thought it would be a good idea to expand my understanding by taking an HTML and CSS fundamentals course at my community college while I am getting my associates.
I have taken a Coursera course and studied fundamental practices for web design and development, but I wanted to see what I could learn by formally going through a course about the fundamentals before I go to university.
The Course
HTML is so simple, "it's like Legos". Going through this course with something I am fairly familiar with, felt very tedious and as if I was not learning much or anything at all at times.
Accessibility
The first topic of the course was accessibility. Accessibility was not something that was extensively familiar with. Learning about the importance of accessibility was interesting. Here are some of the things I learned from the topic:
What I learned about accessibility
- Meeting accessibility is required by law in some countries for web sites
- 10% of internet users have a disability (or something like that) says W3 I think
- So many (most) websites or apps fail in some way in accessibility such as keyboard navigation.
- Accessibility benefits not only the disabled but everyone
- Implementing Accessibility greatly improves the sites visual and usability
- W3 has specific color contrast standards that are important for impaired vision and easier readability of content.
Re-Learning the languages
Anybody can use HTML or CSS like how anybody can play Legos, but accessibility, techniques, and design principles are what I think are important. Learning new tags, style attributes and concepts were very interesting and have helped me out.
Some of the syntactical things I learned
- familiarity with floating. I knew how to float and clear elements, but I now am able to understand it much better.
- Less common tags such as figure, kbd, image and q I had not known before
- New CSS properties like text columns and other random things I have never seen before
- I never knew about normalize.css
Being Certified
I was able to get a free Microsoft MTA certification with the class. It is nice to know that I knew somewhat that I was certified in some way and not just looking at the MDN or W3Schools to learn everything.
Why I Recommend A fundamental course
The fundamentals allowed me to understand websites in a new way. Self-teaching allows me to get into more advanced concepts while the college course was able to expand my understanding about how everything works.
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