HTML Modifications
Lessons from Validator
Running the code through the HTML validator revealed multiple errors. Here's a brief summary of lessons learned:
- The Validator will help catch minor punctuation errors in the code. I had many duplicate quotation marks, for example.
- The Validator will help catch orthographical errors in the code. When I was just starting to learn writing in English, our teachers always warned us that we need to pay attention to letters "d" and "g". Apparently, foreign kids are highly likely to mix the two, as the only difference is the position of the extra line near the circle: for "d", the line is above, and for "g" - it's below. I have not run into that mistake throughout my childhood, because I was writing in cursive, and cursive "d" and "g" are written very differently. However, with HTML, I somehow keep making the mistake of mixing these two up, which leads to many mistakes when I am trying to create a closing angle bracket. The Validator helped me catch those.
- It's important to be careful with "find and replace all". My HTML for one of the modules had 313 errors, because the doctype was declared incorrectly - all because in an attempt to correct the mistake about which I elaborated earlier, I "found and replaced" all "d"s with "g"s, and the doctype declaration happened to have not just one "d".
- A list can't be inside a paragraph. At least that's what I understood from the validator. Somehow this point escaped my attention before.
- There can't be a list inside a list. I thought I could put an ordered list into an unordered list. It doesn't fit the hierarchy, however.
- Validator standards are quite rigid and aren't always reasonable. The Validator didn't want to recognize the code I generated with the help of Creative Commons. But the code looks like it is supposed to, and the Validator isn't to be listened to at all times
Lessons from Findability
I had silly names for all my headings, and I thought it was cute. The information we got on findability, however, made me re-think all the headings. I tried making them more related to the point of the paragraph. I'm not sure I succeeded, but I'm sure what I have now is better than before.
Lessons from Accessibility
The pages are created were reviewed as "accessible". There was a warning, however, that my headings aren't in order: from h1 I skip to h3. I re-thought the structure of my pages and made sure I give appropriate heading sizes to all of my content, and they go from most important and general to least important and specific.
CSS Modifications
My CSS wasn't too bad. The validator helped me catch the one time I didn't put a # before a color code (and I wondered why it wasn't working). I also learned that even though my nice rounded corners won't show up in non-advanced browsers, I can leave the code there: it will look even better in Firefox.
Look & Feel Modifications
Even though the color scheme I chose looked great on Color Scheme Designer, my execution isn't great. I didn't change anything yet - I'm not sure what to do even now. I did put the left navigation bar outside of the main container to establish that it relates to a more general hierarchy of my dstepan1 web site. The right navigation bar relates to module 6 only, and I hope I made it clearer with this little modification.
