HASTA ...
Curso gratuito: ¿Crear un blog desde cero?
Podría ser más fácil de lo que imaginaba
Antes de llegar al artículo, solo quiero compartir que estoy creando un producto y me encantaría recopilar algunos datos sobre cómo servir mejor a los desarrolladores web. Creé un breve cuestionario para consultar antes o después de leer este artículo. Por favor, compruébalo, ¡gracias! Y ahora, volvamos a nuestra programación habitual.
Si eres como yo, estás interesado en la web y su alcance abrumador, pero también estás inundado con el desorden de información que está aprendiendo HTML y CSS. El caso es que estos lenguajes son diferentes a otros dominios, como procesadores de texto y lenguajes de programación. La web es otro mundo y no es la cosa más bonita que existe.
Habiendo aprendido algo de web, estoy aquí para dar un suave empujón de ánimo, porque, con un poco de orientación , estos dominios pueden ser mucho más fáciles de lo que imagina. Continúe leyendo y crearemos un hermoso blog desde cero. También aprenderemos algo de CSS Grid, Flexbox y Responsive Design.
El objetivo es hacer por ti lo que yo he hecho por mí; Aprenda HTML y CSS desde los primeros principios.
También enseñé un curso gratuito de HTML / CSS en Scrimba donde enseño cómo crear un blog hermoso desde * cero *. ¡Haga clic aquí para inscribirse! ?
Scrimba.com es una plataforma interactiva de front-end donde los sitios web se registran como eventos, no como videos, ¡y se pueden editar! ?
Entonces, ¿de dónde viene HTML?
HTML es un descendiente del primer meta o lenguaje de marcado : GML. Los lectores de la generación del milenio ahora están descubriendo que GML significa lenguaje de marcado generalizado , pero eso no es todo lo que significa. Fueron Charles G. Oldfarb, Edward M osher y Raymond L orie quienes crearon lo que ahora conocemos como metao lenguaje de marcadoen IBM. Y en 1996, Charles Goldfarb escribió:
“Le di a GML su nombre actual para que nuestras iniciales siempre probaran dónde se había originado. Una de las verdades desagradables de la transferencia de tecnología es que los desarrolladores tienden a estar agradecidos por el trabajo de investigación cuando lo reciben por primera vez, y virtualmente ajenos a él al final de un largo ciclo de desarrollo… ”- Charles Goldfarb, en 1996GML más tarde se convirtió S tandardized, convirtiéndose así en SGML. Luego, Tim Berners-Lee, que trabajó en el CERN, tomó prestado el ML de SGML (no, no es aprendizaje automático, o como lo llamen los hipsters) para crear HTML, donde HT significa H yper T ext.
Guau, palabra genial. Y, según tengo entendido, tiene sus raíces en un entorno de creación interactivo llamado HyperCard, de Bill Atkinson, que trabajaba en Apple. Para una exploración más profunda, presento los siguientes videos:
Entonces, recapitulemos. HTML no solo se apoderó del mundo. De hecho, existía todo un mundo antes de HTML. WUT? Lo sé, estoy temblando de shock, pero no había nacido, así que no había un mundo.
Y HTML le debe mucho a sus predecesores. Como todos nosotros con nuestros padres. No obstante, así es como creamos código a partir de texto. Ahora, en cuatro lecciones de un minuto , enseñaré los conceptos básicos de HTML, CSS y Diseño Responsive.
HTML y CSS en 4 minutos
Primer minuto: un sitio web puede entenderse mejor como un árbol web
Todos los sitios web comienzan su vida como tales. Sin embargo, y esto es terrible, no hay contenido. Sin embargo, comenzamos aquí porque primero debemos comprender qué es un sitio web. Piense en ello como un árbol, un árbol al revés *, un árbol de telaraña . El htmlelemento es la raíz, mientras que heady bodyson las primeras ramas de nuestro árbol web :
html <- root / \head body <- branchesEl headelemento (o etiqueta, lo mismo) es para metadatos o información sobre nuestro sitio web. El bodyelemento, por otro lado, es para el contenido de nuestro sitio web. Y como CSS es el estilo de nuestro sitio web, va en el headelemento, mientras que el contenido, como los párrafos, los videos de gatos (≧ ∇ ≦), etc., va en el bodyelemento.
Segundo minuto: los elementos o etiquetas tienen múltiples apariencias.
valuevalue- El primer elemento es un elemento de cierre automático , donde le comunicamos algo al navegador, pero tampoco tiene un valor. Un ejemplo de esto es el
<elemento br>, que inserta un salto de línea. - El segundo elemento es un elemento común , donde comunicamos unvalor como perteneciente a algún elemento. Por ejemplo
es el valor "¡hola, mundo!" como perteneciente al elemento de párrafo.hello, worl¡re! - Por último, tenemos un elemento con un atributo . Y un atributo es lo que suena: maldita sea, ¡es un atributo ! Le da a un elemento más contexto o significado. Los atributos pueden tener varios valores y los elementos pueden tener varios atributos. Opción de atributo.
valueAhora, necesito mencionar, no creamos los nombres de nuestros elementos HTML. Los tomamos prestados de una lista de más de 100 elementos que están predefinidos. Por supuesto, esto hace que algunas cosas sean más fáciles y otras mucho, mucho más difíciles, como la memorización.
Tercer minuto: cómo se comunican HTML y CSS
selector { property: value; } value Las !DOCTYPE htmlespecifica estamos escribiendo HTML 5, como se supone que todas las otras versiones de HTML que queremos evitar. Y dado el elemento de cierre automáticometa con el atributocharset y el valorUTF-8 , nuestro texto está codificado en Unicode. UTF-8 son las siglas de U nicode T ransformation F ormat… 8 . ¡Ahora podemos escribir en ????! Una vez, papá decidió enviar un mensaje de texto solo con emo ji.
También agregamos un styleelemento que es uno de los puntos de entrada disponibles para CSS. Donde selectorselecciona un elemento y le aplica propertya con un correspondiente value. Exploraremos esto y más en el próximo minuto.
Again—I need to mention—we don’t create the names of our CSS properties. We borrow them from a list of some hundreds of properties that are predefined. Of course, this makes some things easier, and some things much, much harder, such as ____________!
Fourth minute: hello, world!
p { color: green; }@media (max-width: 8.5in) { p { color: blue; } }@media (max-width: 5.0in) { p { color: red ; } }hello, world!
No longer is our website terrible! What we have is “hello, world!” in green text, and if our website’s width were resized to 8.5 inches or less, it would read in blue, and at 5 inches or less, red. Here, we used media queries to override CSS in some circumstance, like our website’s width.
What is a CSS Reset and Debugger?
We use a reset to ensure our design is consistent, and a debugger to expose inconsistencies.
We need our reset, because browsers are opinionated and set some CSS properties for us that we want to unset. Popular CSS Resets exist, but we’ll make our own. And we need our debugger for maintaining our website’s design with ease.
We can make a folder named styles to house our reset and debugger:
styles/ reset.css debug.cssAnd to link our new CSS files to our index.html, we add link elements:
… …Our CSS Reset
Of the properties we want to unset, here’s a shortlist:
:root { font: 20px/1.2 sans-serif; }body, body * { margin: unset; box-sizing: unset; padding: unset; font-size: unset; color: unset; text-decoration: unset;}Ignore line 1. for now—let’s start with body, body * { … } where we select the body and all of the body’s elements with an *. The asterisk means select all children. Remember our webtree?
html / \head body <- selected / \ \… … p <- selectedbody, body * { … } is selecting the body and—a , denotes and—p because it’s one of body’s children. This is known as the parent-child relationship, where body is the parent and p is the child. And we tell those elements to unset common properties. The properties I’ve chosen are just a shortlist. Here’s an example of one of the most famous CSS Resets:
/* //meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/ v2.0 | 20110126 License: none (public domain)*/html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,del, dfn, em, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,b, u, i, center,dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,fieldset, form, label, legend,table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td,article, aside, canvas, details, embed,figure, figcaption, footer, header, hgroup,menu, nav, output, ruby, section, summary,time, mark, audio, video { margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0; font-size: 100%; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;}/* HTML5 display-role reset for older browsers */article, aside, details, figcaption, figure,footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, section { display: block;}body { line-height: 1;}ol, ul { list-style: none;}blockquote, q { quotes: none;}blockquote:before, blockquote:after,q:before, q:after { content: ''; content: none;}table { border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0;}Yikes! Back to our reset. At the top we have :root { font: 20px/1.2 sans-serif; }. What’s :root? Remember our webtree? It’s the root, in other words, thehtml element. This pseudo-element belongs to a special class of elements known as psuedo-classes, which can be used to better organize and understand our CSS.
WAAAIT! Don’t we need an * to select all children elements, so their font properties are set? Well—great question—some properties, such as text properties inherit from their parents, and font does. So instead we can set font once in :root, which propagates to all its children. Property-ception.
Our CSS Debugger
A debugger emphasizes the content and border of elements:
body * { color: hsla(000, 100%, 100%, 0.88) !important; background: hsla(210, 100%, 50%, 0.33) !important; outline: 0.25rem solid hsla(000, 100%, 100%, 0.50) !important;}Behold! In just three lines, our debugger. This clever technique overrides three common properties: color, background, and outline. Our colors are made up of hsla() values, which is short for hue, saturation, luminance, and alpha. To enable our debugger, we link the file.
Should we want to disable our debugger, we can mistype the filename so as to hide it from our computer’s filesystem, e.g.:
Or just delete the line. ٩(^ᴗ^)۶
Our debugger uses hilarious !important values so as to state that under no conditions can these properties be overridden. Remember media queries?
p { color: green !important; }@media (max-width: 8.5in) { p { color: blue; } }@media (max-width: 5.0in) { p { color: red ; } }Had we specified that our p color is !important, our media queries would be inert, due to their lesser importance.
Meet CSS Grid and Flexbox
I would argue that before CSS Grid and Flexbox, designing for the web was a hero’s journey.
The thing is, web design used to be a juggling-act of hacks where we trick the browser into rendering our designs. This is becoming less true with time. I’m not religious, but thank God!—or, thank browser engineers!—wherefore now we can lean on CSS Grid and Flexbox to kickstart our design.
If you’re not aware, CSS Grid and Flexbox are newer technologies baked into modern browsers that take the hero’s journey out of web design. And CSS Grid and Flexbox are friends — we’ll use them together to both create a grid and flex elements in our grid.
Our first grid: HTML
… ARTICLE
ARTICLE
…Remember our webtree?
body / \article article / \ p pWe’re making a blog, so each post can be thought of as an article. And our articles contain a p of ARTICLE which is another clever trick we can use. Using the name of the element as the value of the element to help us understand where and what things are. Value-ception.
Our first grid: CSS
… article { display: grid; grid-template-columns: 1fr minmax(0, 8.5in) 1fr; height: 11in; /* temp fix */}article * { grid-column: 2 / 3; } …Ingrese CSS Grid. Primero, seleccionamos el artículo y aplicamos tres propiedades: displaydefine el elemento como una cuadrícula, grid-template-columnsplantillas de columnas y heightsimula que cada articleuno tiene la altura de una página. Sin embargo, heightes un código adhesivo y se eliminará.
Centrémonos en las dos líneas más importantes:
article { grid-template-columns: 1fr minmax(0, 8.5in) 1fr; }article * { grid-column: 2 / 3; }O, en otras ocasiones:
Tendrás tres columnas, cuya columna central albergará a tus hijos.First, had we set grid-template-columns to 1fr 1fr 1fr, where fr is short for fraction-unit, our three columns would be divided in thirds. Yet our center column has a minmax width, meaning it’s responsive. At or less than 8.5in, our center column renders at 100% width, and our left and rightmost columns disappear, as there’s no remainder.
Sidebar: note that responsive design is not limited to media queries. This is an example of where our design is implicitly responsive, as opposed to explicitly responsive. This is the best kind of responsive design, because it’s not hard-coded. And this is one of the reasons CSS Grid and Flexbox are so powerful.
En segundo lugar, para comunicar que articlelos niños 's pertenecen a la columna central, o empezar en la segunda columna y final en la tercera , nos propusimos grid-columna 2 / 3. Tenga en cuenta la sutil diferencia entre grid-template-columny grid-column, ya sea para columnas de plantilla o columnas de extensión .
CSS Grid es genial, y lo es, pero ahora nos apoyaremos en Flexbox para centrar nuestro ARTICLEtexto. Lo que vamos a hacer es crear una clase de utilidad , y es otro paradigma para escribir CSS. Aquí, usamos el hecho de que los elementos pueden tener atributos de estilo en línea para el pelemento:
ARTICLE
Here’s what’s going on: elements have a class attribute. And we can use this attribute to not just write CSS to elements, but to a kind of element or class of element. This means we can reuse classes across multiple elements, regardless of their likeness. Alas—nothing’s changed—we need to also create a .debug-center class somewhere in our CSS. How about our debugger:
….debug-center { display: flex; justify-content: center; align-items: center;}Note we use a . prefix to differentiate classes from elements.
Now, wherever an element is attributed with our debug-center class, its text will center. First, we set display to flex making whichever element a Flexbox-element as opposed to a CSS Grid-element. Then we set justify-content to center to center horizontally and align-items to center to center vertically. Aaagh!
Imagine this: we use Grid to layout our website’s design, and Flexbox to flex the elements in our grid to some desired position.
Iterating our grid
We have a problem: without .debug-centerARTICLE hugs the left and right walls. What we need are vertical and horizontal gutters so that our content can breathe. Aaah. Otherwise reading would become frustrating and would lead to a poor user experience. ヾ( •́д•̀ ;)ﾉ
For vertical padding:
article { padding: 0.5in 0; …}And for horizontal padding, we could use padding, and either would work:
padding: 0.5in 0.5in;padding: 0.5in;However, we want our gutters to be responsive, so we’ll use CSS Grid:
article { … grid-template-columns: 1fr 0.5in [start] 7.5in [end] 0.5in 1fr}Here, we did three things: 1. we defined our horizontal gutters to be 0.5in (these will become responsive—I promise!). 2. our content-column went from 8.5in to 7.5in, the sum still being 8.5in , and 3. made up identifiers start and end to name the start and end of our content-column.
When we added new columns, we needed to also update article *:
article * { grid-column: 3 / 4; }But counting columns isn’t ideal. Instead—let’s use our made-up identifiers:
article * { grid-column: start / end; }Weupdated our grid without breaking the flow of content, so long as we continue to use the start and end identifiers we made up. ⊂◉‿◉つ
Last—as promised—we need our gutters to be responsive. minmax() for one reason or another doesn’t work here, so we’ll use media queries:
@media (max-width: 8.5in) { article { grid-template-columns: 1fr 5% [start] 90% [end] 5% 1fr; }}Nowat or less than8.5in, article will use % instead of in to divide our columns, and the left and rightmost columns will disappear because—again—there’s no remainder. Despite all this, we could’ve set padding to 0.5in 5% to achieve the same effect, so what gives? Read on!
Iterating our grid, again
To understand our grid, let’s use images to span columns, from 100% to 8.5in to 7.5in on desktop, and from 100% to 90% on mobile. However, for the last image, the one on the left at the bottom, we need to add even few more columns to our grid. AF)UBQWF*VBQPWIFB, am I right?
Don’t be intimidated—CSS grid is awesome. Let’s add two more columns:
article { … grid-template-columns: 1fr 0.5in [start] 1.25in 5in 1.25in [end] 0.5in 1fr;}@media (max-width: 8.5in) { article { grid-template-columns: 1fr 5% [start] 15% 60% 15%[end] 5% 1fr; }}We broke up our content-column into three columns: 1.25in 5in 1.25in . We also added proportional percents for our media query: 15% 60% 15%. The plan is for text to span our original 7.5in content-column, and for small images to span our new 5in column.
To add images, we use the img element and its src—source—attribute:
… …These are local, that is, they’re on our computer. And were they remote, that is, on a server:
Note that each img has one of four classes: size-*. And because we’ll want more than images, like videos, to span our website’s grid, it’s preferred we use classes so we can reuse the CSS. These size-* classes are also Utility Classes, so changing which size we want is simple.
Let’s make our size-* classes span different sets of columns:
.size-1 { grid-column: 4 / 5; }.size-2 { grid-column: 3 / 6; }.size-3 { grid-column: 2 / 7; }.size-4 { grid-column: 1 / 8; }What’s missing is that our imgs aren’t responsive. We need:
img.size-1, img.size-2, img.size-3, img.size-4 { width: 100%; }Because imgs render at their actual size, for example, a 400 × 400 image rendering at 400px, we needed to override that behavior with our own: width: 100%. Thus when an image is attributed with a size-* class, it can resize to whatever columns it’s spanning. Note we need not set height.
Adding text elements
Website and content links
Now that we’re getting serious with our article, let’s make things formal:
… …Now each article is linkable. Linkable? Well—websites are links:
//website.com/index.htmlAnd our website’s content, for example articles, can be linked to, too:
//website.com/index.html#articleHere article is the value of an id attribute, analogous to linking a timestamp in a YouTube video (for example, this one). Better than suggesting “start at 4 minutes and 7 seconds” or “read from the second article,” we can link content in our website, like a timestamp in a video.
To link a website or content, we use the a element and href attribute:
… The Cosmos …The text “The Cosmos” now links the start of the article: #the-cosmos.
This idea of linking (linking websites and content in websites) is one of the points of HTML. HyperCard mastered this, but instead of linking websites and content, was interested in ideas and associations. At the time, it was 1987 and HTML was first proposed in 1989. Watch a few seconds from the video I posted earlier—here I’ve linked a timestamp:
Text elements
Let’s add headings, a publication-date, strong and emphasized text, and links:
The Cosmos is all there is
Or ever was, or ever will be
MAR. 9, 2014 A generation ago, the astronomer Carl Sagan stood here and launched hundreds of millions of us on a great adventure the exploration of the universe revealed by science. It's time to get going again. We're about to begin a journey that will take us from the infinitesimal to the infinite, from the dawn of time to the distant future. We'll explore galaxies and suns and worlds, surf the gravity waves of space-time, encounter beings that live in fire and ice, explore the planets of stars that never die, discover atoms as massive as suns and universes smaller than atoms.
COSMOS IS ALSO A STORY ABOUT US
It's the saga of how wandering bands of hunters and gatherers found their way to the stars, one adventure with many heroes. To make this journey, we'll need imagination. But imagination alone is not enough because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine. This adventure is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adhering to a simple set of rules test ideas by experiment and observation, build on those ideas that pass the test, reject the ones that fail, follow the evidence wherever it leads and question everything. Accept these terms, and the cosmos is yours.
These are the opening lines to our personal astrophysicist’s — Neil deGrasse Tyson’s — 2014 Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a reimagining of Carl Sagan’s original 1980 Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. It’s sci-fi without the -fi. And it’s getting renewed in 2019!
Above we introduced a few elements: h1, h2, h3, time, strong, and em.
h1–h6elements are headlines.- The
timeelement timestamps our article. We can put whatever we want for the element value, because computers read thedatetimeattribute’s value, which should be machine-readable. - The
strongelement is for strong text and theemelement is for emphasized text. Also,h*elements are strong.
Note that h* and p elements break from one line to the next, or block, whereas time, strong, and em elements don’t. This is because browsers set the h* and p element’s display to block, and the time, strong, and em element’s display to inline.
Rems and ems
When it’s not enough to block elements from one line to the next, we use line-breaks so it’s easier to differentiate elements from one another, not unlike padding or gutters. We could use br elements here, but it’s preferred we use extraneous CSS over extraneous HTML.
Here’s how to push content two line-breaks, following h2 and p elements:
h2, p { margin-bottom: 2.4rem; }2.4rem?
Remember our reset? We set font to 20px/1.2 sans-serif. I didn’t explain it at the time—and shame on me—but 2.4 is two-line breaks at 1.2 line-height, for example, single-spaced text. More readable text could be 1.5, and double-spaced text could be 2.
*Ahem* What are rems?
*Ahem ahem* And what are ems?
rem is rootem and both are multipliers. 1rem is 20px and 1em is the parent’s font-size. Had we defined our line-breaks in ems, not rems, and set h2 and p to different font-sizes, their line-breaks would differ! Therefore, consistent line-breaks use rems and inconsistent ones use ems.
Y esta es una idea poderosa: escribir CSS de manera que el diseño esté conectado . Dada esta iluminación, siento que es mucho más sabioapiense en CSS no en las reglas sino en las relaciones. Por lo tanto, si hacemos un cambio en alguna parte, podemos realizar un cambio en todas partes.
... hacer un cambio en alguna parte ...... hacer un cambio en todas partes ...
Diseño responsive responsive
¿Qué pasa si escribimos CSS en rems y ems, y preguntas de los medios utilizar para cambiar :root's font-size? Entonces todo , y me refiero a todo, cambiará de tamaño proporcionalmente. Podemos ir incluso un paso más allá y tener múltiples consultas de medios para múltiples anchos:
@media (max-width: 8.5in) { :root { font-size: 18px; } }@media (max-width: 5.0in) { :root { font-size: 16px; } }Lo sorprendente de esto es que no solo anulamosuna propiedad , estamos anulando la propiedad para remsy ems. Ahora podemos escribir CSS que no solo sea receptivo sino que responda a nuestro diseño receptivo. Esta es quizás la oración más importante de toda esta publicación:
Esto no es solo genial, es cómo deberíamos escribir CSS. Los sitios web tienden a ser terribles, y creo que se puede reducir a esto: cuando escribimos CSS, debemos escribir en sistemas de diseño y no en código silo . Cuando usamos remsys emjunto con consultas de medios, eso es un sistema de diseño y el código no está aislado.
Estilo de texto
Por amor al estilo, agreguemos algunos:
h1 { font: 700 2.0rem/1.2 …; color: hsl(000, 000%, 33%); }h2 { font: 400 1.5rem/1.2 …; color: hsl(000, 000%, 33%); }time { font: 700 1.0rem/1.2 …; color: hsl(250, 100%, 83%); }h3 { font: 700 1.0rem/1.2 …; color: hsl(250, 100%, 67%); }p { font: 400 1.0rem/1.5 …; color: hsl(000, 000%, 33%); }Properties can have shorthands as we’ve seen before; padding: 0.5in, equivalent to padding: 0.5in 0.5in. And here, we use font to combine font-weight, font-size, and line-height. After font, we have color with hsl values, like hsla values in our debugger.
An unaddressed problem is our a element. In our reset, we unset color and text-decoration making links indiscriminate from text. We unset these properties because text-decoration: underline is too subtle. So here’s how we can give them a strong underline:
a { box-shadow: inset 0 -0.25em hsl(55, 100%, 75%); }We invert box-shadow to create an underline that is inside the element. Had we set inset without a negative value, our underline would be an overline. We also use em so the underline scales with its font-size. This is an example of when we want inconsistent scaling, as supposed to our line-breaks.
There’s much more to box-shadow than this: click to learn more.
Last step: gradients
Wohoo! All we need is a cue for our readers as to where an article starts and ends. Without that, the ends of each article will feel like an endless continuation, which leads to a poor user-experience. So we need to give our readers a hint… (◔̯◔)
What I propose is simple: a gradient that extends from the top of each article to the bottom of its h2 element. And we can write our gradient in ems so that as our website resizes, so does our gradient:
article { … background: linear-gradient(hsl(55, 100%, 96%), white 6.83em);}Here we’ve defined a color-to-white gradient, and used 6.83em so our gradient doesn’t extend the entire article but ends at the equivalent of the bottom of our h2 element. However, the exact value depends.
You can either do math to determine the size, for example 6.83em, but another technique is to set a size on the top-color, for example hsl(55, 100%, 96%) 6.83em. Once it’s equal to or greater than the bottom color’s size, it will appear as a line and not a gradient, making it intuitive what to change it to.
Congratulations ?
Congratulations! ٩(˘.˘)۶ You’ve stepped into a world in desperate need of better designers and engineers. And with CSS Grid, Flexbox, Responsive Design and browser-level debuggers, developing for the web has never been more accessible.
Don’t forget there’s a free course on Scrimba where I teach how to make the same website from *scratch*. Click here to enroll!