Posted In: Reflections
This week, our assigned reading focused on the use of style in our blogs and how to implement it within each file (to our text and general layout). Rather than HTML, a programming language called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is used to edit the style of elements within a file.
While learning about the different commands available for use in the CSS language to edit our own blogs, I was reminded of a similar process, even though it’s kind of cheesy. Editing each individual element on a page, from clear differences to the smallest of details, reminds me of designing a new avatar on a game or application.
For example, during the process of creating your own avatar for a game like Skyrim, you have the ability to change every physical characteristic thinkable, developing a character identical to yourself or however you prefer them to look. You can change the more obvious details of the avatar, like skin color, gender, or hair style and color. But you also have the opportunity to change minute details that you can barely see even while designing the avatar. These are characteristics like distance between the eyes, shape of nose, or size of mouth.
Similarly, you have the opportunity to uniquely style a file on your blog or site in largely obvious ways or subtle changes that you believe will make a big difference. An example of this would be the diverse stylistic edits you can make to the text within a paragraph. Using the “p” selector allows you to edit the style of a paragraph as a whole. Some examples of these edits, the ones given in the assigned reading for the week, include font size, text color, and margin size. By including specific stylistic designations here, the style of the entire paragraph is changed, creating a more obvious change to your file as a whole.
On the other hand, you have the opportunity to change more specific and less noticeable details about a file. Let’s keep with our example of stylizing text in a document. You can choose individual words or phrases within a text to make these same edits (color, size, font, etc.) These create effects that don’t really change the file as a whole, but while reading, it brings the reader’s attention to this change, informing them that there is something worth noticing here.
Another unique attribute of CSS is the use of classes and IDs. These are basically ways to edit the style of more than one element at once. And the best part? You get to customize these classes and IDs to edit whatever group of elements you wish to style.
For example, we can create a class called “.blue-paragraph” and then specify that the font-color of text in this class needs to be blue. Later, after finding a paragraph in the text that you want to have this attribute, you can simply apply the class to that specific paragraph. This is a useful tool for efficiently styling files however you want.