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.