Posted In: Reflections
This week while reading and learning about the details of writing in both Markdown and HTML, I found a video on youtube.com that was very similar to our own reading for the week: What is HTML? HyperText Markup Language Explained.
The speaker first referenced right clicking on a page and viewing its source code, just as Dr. Pilsch had asked us to do ourselves. This code is of course written in HTML.
HTML is defined as “a text-based approach to describing the structure of a webpage’s content.” We know from the week’s reading that this is true. Computer programmers developed HTML so that webpages could be constructed more easily, with more human language.
The speaker then talks about tags. These “structural commands” are used to “specify location and display instructions.” With all the tags we learned about this week, we know this is a good way of describing them, since tags tell the computer what we want on the screen and where we want it.
The common structure for tags was also discussed. This structure is the opening tag, content and closing tag. After our hands-on activity, we’ve gotten plenty of practice with this, using tags like <nav> and </nav> to create a menu for our blog to provide a link for our “About” page.
The speaker discussed the flexibility of writing HTML, noting that it can be written in almost any editor including Notepad. Since we’ve just been using gihub.com without any problems, it is easy for us to assume that this is true.
From what we hear in the video, it sounds like HTML is a great option for a computer programming language. The speaker tells us that HTML is “native to every browser, easy to learn, free to use, and can be integrated with other programming back-end programming languages.” Although we haven’t learned a lot about HTML as it refers to other languages, some of these statements we can confirm. Since we are only English students and were able to learn the basics of HTML in one lesson, we can probably all agree that HTML is “easy to learn.” And since we were able to use HTML on our own browser just by making a github account, we also know that it is “free to use.”
One downfall of HTML discussed in the video is the fact that it is limited “to static webpages.” Lucky for us, this isn’t a problem. Making a blog focused on writing means any other advanced computer programming is unnecessary. We simply need to make different pages containing our variety of content.
Finally, HTML could be problematic when it is updated, since the newest versions are not yet known to certain browsers. But as of right now, I believe this isn’t a problem for our coding, since we are using a fully updated program on github.
It sounds like the very basic format and details of HTML make it perfect for an introductory class on blog creation and web development.