Teaching in Porto, day three
Day two ended with a bit of a cliffhanger as I had the students mark up a document, but not yet style it. In the morning of day three, the styling began.
Rather than just treat “styling” as one big monolithic task, I broke it down into typography, colour, negative space, and so on. We time-boxed each one of those parts of the visual design. So everyone got, say, fifteen minutes to write styles relating to font families and sizes, then another fifteen minutes to write styles for colours and background colours. Bit by bit, the styles were layered on.
When it came to layout, we closed the laptops and returned to paper. Everyone did a quick round of 6-up sketching so that there was plenty of fast iteration on layout ideas. That was followed by some critique and dot-voting of the sketches.
Rather than diving into the CSS for layout — which can get quite complex — I instead walked through the approach for layout; namely putting all your layout styles inside media queries. To explain media queries, I first explained media types and then introduced the query part.
I felt pretty confident that I could skip over the nitty-gritty of media queries and cross-device layout because the next masterclass that will be taught at the New Digital School will be a week of responsive design, taught by Vitaly. I just gave them a taster — Vitaly can dive deeper.
By lunch time, I felt that we had covered CSS pretty well. After lunch it was time for the really challenging part: JavaScript.
The reason why I think JavaScript is challenging is that it’s inherently more complex than HTML or CSS. Those are declarative languages with fairly basic concepts at heart (elements, attributes, selectors, etc.), whereas an imperative language like JavaScript means entering the territory of logic, loops, variables, arrays, objects, and so on. I really didn’t want to get stuck in the weeds with that stuff.
I focused on the combination of JavaScript and the Document Object Model as a way of manipulating the HTML and CSS that’s already inside a browser. A lot of that boils down to this pattern:
When (some event happens), then (take this action).
We brainstormed some examples of this e.g. “When the user submits a form, then show a modal dialogue with an acknowledgement.” I then encouraged them to write a script …but I don’t mean a script in the JavaScript sense; I mean a script in the screenwriting or theatre sense. Line by line, write out each step that you want to accomplish. Once you’ve done that, translate each line of your English (or Portuguese) script into JavaScript.
I did quick demo as a proof of concept (which, much to my surprise, actually worked first time), but I was at pains to point out that they didn’t need to remember the syntax or vocabulary of the script; it was much more important to have a clear understanding of the thinking behind it.
With the remaining time left in the day, we ran through the many browser APIs available to JavaScript, from the relatively simple — like querySelector and Ajax—right up to the latest device APIs. I think I got the message across that, using JavaScript, there’s practically no limit to what you can do on the web these days …but the trick is to use that power responsibly.
At this point, we’ve had three days and we’ve covered three layers of web technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Tomorrow we’ll take a step back from the nitty-gritty of the code. It’s going to be all about how to plan and think about building for the web before a single line of code gets written.
This was originally posted on my own site.
