On Thu, 2024-08-22 at 09:14 -1000, Joel Roth via Dng wrote:
> Peter Duffy wrote:
> > Thanks.
> >
> > I think my own problems boil down to:
> >
> > CSS: I'm not a graphic designer and have no skills/training in that
> > line. So I can see when something isn't right, but all I can do is
> > try
> > tweaking things until it (hopefully) looks better. Presumably a
> > graphic
> > designer would see that something was wrong and would know why, and
> > what to do to fix it.
> >
> > Progressive enhancement: the tendency is always to imagine how the
> > page
> > will look on the desktop screen, and it's just a matter of having
> > the
> > self-discipline to force oneself to start off by imagining it on a
> > mobile phone. Plus - the vast majority of online examples start
> > with
> > big screen and use media queries to modify down to small screen.
> > Modifying them (effectively "inverting" most of the CSS
> > definitions) to
> > start with small screen and modify up to large ones is the mind-
> > boggling bit.
>
> I was looking on my bookshelf for the O'Reilly CSS book just
> now. If I recall correctly, it is around 800 pages. There
> are many ways to accomplish a task in CSS and it's a
> challenge to learn a useful subset with uniform coding
> practices.
>

I've got the 4th edition of it ("CSS: The Definitive Guide") - it's now
1057 pages. It covers CSS v3, and includes sizeable chapters on flex
and grid layouts. Over the last year, I've read most of the book
several times, and some of it is starting(?) to sink in. One thing
about this edition (don't know if it was the same in earlier versions)
is that all the example code is downloadable - which is great, provided
that one downloads all the examples and then reads the book in
conjunction with a computer to run them all.


> I haven't dived very deep in CSS, but recently (well a
> couple years ago already) had a good experience using
> Bulma(*1) to make a page suitable for various display
> formats.
>
> 1. https://bulma.io
>
>

I've read some very good reviews of Bulma, and it's high on my list of
alternatives if I hit major problems with CodeIgniter (at the moment,
CI seems to be doing the business).

One thing about web development which really bugs me. There are tons of
books which attempt to teach graphic designers to do basic HTML, CSS
and even (heaven help them) PHP and Javascript. But - at least so far -
I've not found a single one which really grasps the nettle of teaching
graphic design concepts and skills to programmers. (I've seen a few
which try to do it, and so far they've been uniformly awful.) 

It's things like the endless injunctions to produce "wireframes" and
static layout designs, and usually to use some (expensive) graphic tool
to produce them. But if one can happily grind out HTML and CSS at the
drop of a hat, why on earth not produce the basic sketches and designs
using those? That way, right from the word go, one is using the tools
and languages that will be used all the way through the project -
rather than having to take some static graphic design and try to work
out how to express it in HTML/CSS. Adding details and changing things
just builds on what's already there, and fits in neatly with the
principle of stepwise refinement (which in my experience underlies all
good programming).