Journal 6: Self-Reflection

I've really enjoyed this class so far. As someone with zero experience in web design or programming I wasn't sure how difficult this class was going to be for me. Fortunately, I've found that I actually find the HTML to be incredibly intuitive. While I may often have to look up the exact tag for a particular function, I can always look it up, and actually using them makes a lot of sense - particularly linking to other pages. All of the HTML tagging was interesting and fun (particularly all the semantic issues where you could have the web browser know if you were writing a date, time, phone number, etc to help more appropriately display them in the browser). The forms in particular were fascinating to me, although I wish I had some experience in java to understand how more modern forms work.

For links, folders, etc I'm already incredibly neurotic about how I keep files organized on my computer - so maintaining clean folders for an organized easy to link to website hasn't been difficult for me. However, I do have a tendency to decide I want to move something because it will make more sense and I have to be careful not to do that now as it will break all my links. 

The CSS has definitely been the most challenging and rewarding. I am not a visually oriented person, actually trying to design things and decide what looks "good" is hard for me. So even though I get how the CSS is detached from the HTML document and still affects in in various ways depending on the id, class, etc. My problem is I can't imagine how what I'm typing is ultimately going to look. Given that that is the whole point of CSS I'm concerned about my actual abilities to use it to create a beautifully designed webpage.  My most rewarding assignment so far was the chapter 12 exercises, for this exact reason. To actually see step by step how what I was tagging and defining was affecting the website to create a much nicer looking menu made me feel hopeful that I will be able to do it on my own.