Prior to two weeks ago I had no experience with HTML/CSS and didn’t even know that something like Semantic UI existed. I just thought that it was all jumbled up website code that average person will never see… and it is, which is exactly why I’ve enjoyed it so much.
As someone who has played the clarinet since the 7th grade (which was in 2012, wow time flies) and sung pretty much my entire life, I’ve always looked at music as an out, a way to express myself and get the creative juices in my brain flowing. There’s something about getting instant gratification from trying to sing or play a note or song that I’ve heard that just does it for me. There’s no waiting for result, it’s just instant and if you mess up you can go right back and keep on trying until you do get a result that you want.
This feeling of instant gratification is exactly why I’ve been so enthralled with HTML, CSS, and Semantic UI. In a non-HTML/CSS programming world you have to wait till you finish writing a function or program until you can see any real results and even then you never get to see the end result until it is completely finished. And this is assuming that you’ve written code that can even run, as a majority of the time, the first compile of a newly written program tends reveal a laundry list of errors. In HTML, as soon as you start typing things in the <body> you can load the Google Chrome page that IntelliJ generates and instantly see the results of your work, even if it is something as simple as typing: “hi”. And the best part is that your code doesn’t even need to be fully correct for something to be shown on the webpage(ex. spelling the width portion for the image class as ‘witdh’ still displays the desired image, just not at the desired width).
As a programmer, there aren’t many times when you can really express yourself creatively. I mean sure, you can always solve a problem differently than your peers or write interesting comments or function names, but in the end there is usually an optimized solution for the program that you write. As I’ve learned over the past two weeks, this is where a programmer who wants to express themselves creatively can turn to HTML. HTML and CSS give you the ability to create a website exactly how you want it and the addition of a UI Framework such as Semantic UI gives you even more options so that you can have even more control. It is truly a control freak’s paradise and something that I wish I knew about when I was creating my Weebly website for my 8th National History Day project.
For the My Choice assignment where we were tasked with recreating a website of our choice I found myself deep in the rabbit hole of HTML and Semantic UI documentation for a few hours to create a working replica of the lttstore.com homepage. In doing that my eyes were opened to the true power of HTML and Semantic UI, and it made me want to recreate the entire website and continue working on an assignment that I had already finished and turned in, I can’t remember the last time I’ve wanted to do that for a school assignment.
Learning HTML has been a fun learning experience for me, and I can’t wait to see what comes next with React. I’m also slightly infuriated that I can’t look at a website without thinking about how I could recreate it with HTML and Semantic UI.