Frontend Crash Course: HTML and CSS

Frontend Crash Course:
HTML & CSS
Wiﬁ network: CrossCamp.us Events
http://bit.ly/html-css-la

© 2017 Thinkful. All Rights Reserved. 2
About us
We train developers and data
scientists through 1-on-1
mentorship and career prep

About me
Noel Duarte
Los Angeles Area General Manager
UC Berkeley ’15 — worked primarily with R for
population genetics analysis, at Thinkful since January
2016

About you
Why are you here?
I’m interested in becoming a developer
I’m just curious about what coding is
Programming experience?
First lines of code will be written tonight
Been self teaching for 1-3 months
Been at this for 3+ months

Goals
Understand core concepts of using HTML/CSS to
build websites
Complete drills to put those concepts into practice
Build your ﬁrst website
Learn to learn programming, especially the feeling of
struggling with a concept
Take home challenges to keep going

Not goals
Exhaustive coverage of HTML elements / CSS
selectors
JavaScript programming for interactivity
Using developer tools

Why learn frontend development
Job opportunities
Everyone needs a website. You can build them
Good starting place to see if coding is for you

Client / Server
Front-end developer Back-end developer
Client Server

How that relates to what we’re doing
When we write HTML & CSS today, we are
creating those ﬁles that are stored on a
server, sent through a series of tubes, and
then rendered by your browser

Setup
Normally, developers use a text editor to write code
Today, we’re using a tool called Codepen
Codepen lets you write HTML/CSS and instantly
see the results of your work
Create an account: https://codepen.io/accounts/signup
On second page, ﬁll out your info you want to save
your work
Create a new “pen”

Your ﬁrst website
Copy this (don’t worry if you don’t yet understand):
<html>
<body>
<h1>Hello world!</h1>
</body>
</html>

What is HTML?
HTML is the content and
structure of a webpage

What is HTML?

What is HTML?
HTML is the content and structure of a webpage
Three key concepts:
Tags
Elements
Attributes

HTML Tags
Every tag starts with a “less than” sign and ends with a
“greater than” sign
<html> This is an HTML tag
<body> This is a body tag
<h1>Hello world!</h1> This line has two H1
tags, one opening and one closing
</body>
</html>

HTML Tags
There are opening tags and closing tags. Closing tags
have a backslash before the tag name.
HTML tags have become more semantic with HTML5
(or, the word signals the purpose of the tag). We’ll
review some common tags shortly.

HTML Elements
HTML elements usually consist of an opening tag, closing
tag, and some content.
<html>
<body> This element starts here and ends two lines below
<h1>Hello world!</h1> This is an HTML element
</body>
</html>
Some consist of just a self-closing tag
<img src=“http://i.imgur.com/Th5404r.jpg">

HTML Elements
A non-exhaustive list of HTML elements:
<html> HTML tags wrap your entire page
<head> Head tags
<body> Body tags
<h1> H1 tags signify the largest headline. H2
signiﬁes subhead… through h6
<p> Paragraph tags wrap a paragraph of writing

HTML Elements
<p> Paragraph tags wrap a paragraph of writing
<section> Section tags help you organize different
sections of your layout
<div> Div tags are generic/non-semantic container tags
for anything that needs a container
<a> Anchor tags are for setting some text to be a link
<ul> <li> / <ol><li> Unordered list and ordered lists are
for lists of items, containing list item elements
<button> This is a button

HTML Attributes
HTML attributes set properties on an element. They belong
in the opening tag. Here are three common attributes:
<a href=“https://somewhere.com">This is a link</a> href
is an attribute for setting the destination of a link
<h1 class=“headline”>This is a headline</h1> class is an
attribute that doesn’t show up in the rendered webpage,
but will be important when we start talking about CSS
<h1 id=“headline”>This is a headline</h1> id is an
attribute that doesn’t show up in the rendered webpage,
but will be important when we start talking about CSS

HTML Drills
Link here, link there:
http://codepen.io/team/thinkful/pen/qNOGmP
Images 101: http://codepen.io/team/thinkful/pen/gMaJvq
Creating headers: http://codepen.io/team/thinkful/pen/JKGPdW
Add a header element inside of the body (but before the
main content). Inside the header, add a title ("Lorem Ipsum")
on one line, followed by a subtitle on the next ("Holding
places since the 1st century BCE"). The subtitle text should
be smaller than the title text.
Link here, link there solution: http://codepen.io/team/thinkful/pen/aZNGdP
Images 101 solution :http://codepen.io/team/thinkful/pen/OXNZXR
Creating headers: http://codepen.io/team/thinkful/pen/KMzRzy

HTML review
What is HTML?
Tags
Elements
Attributes
Googling HTML elements

What is CSS?
Cascading Style Sheets determine the visual
presentation of your HTML webpages

What is CSS?
Key concepts:
Selectors
Property
Value
Declaration / Declaration block
Two problems we solve with CSS:
Presentation of speciﬁc elements
Layout

CSS Example
h1 {
color: red;
font-size: 36px;
}

CSS Selectors
CSS selectors determine which HTML elements are targeted
for speciﬁc styles:
p This selects all paragraph tags
.header This selects HTML elements with the class
“header”
#navigation This selects HTML elements with the ID
navigation
p.header This selects paragraph tags with the header
class
Selectors can be combined.

CSS Properties
CSS properties determine what about the appearance
you’re setting:
color This determines the font color
font-family This lets you set the typeface as well as
backup typefaces
background-image This lets you set a
background image for an element
height This lets you set the height of an element

CSS Properties
Each property has a default value for a given element.
When you write CSS, you over-ride that default value
with a new value.
For a full list, see: http://www.htmldog.com/
references/css/properties/

CSS Values
Each property has a set of acceptable values that you can set:
color: red, blue, green, #CCCCCC These are all acceptable
values for the color property
font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif These are all
acceptable values for the font-family property
background-image: url("imageFile.jpg") This property looks
for a URL value that points to a speciﬁc image ﬁle
height: 40px 50% Height can be set as an explicit width or as
a percentage of the containing box
Click on a property to see the acceptable values: http://www.htmldog.com/
references/css/properties/

CSS Example
h1 {
color: red;
font-size: 36px;
}
This is a declaration block, containing two
declarations:

CSS Target Practice
Classes drill: Add classes to the two divs to create a
blue box and a red box, as described in the code
comments and paragraphs in the codepen. You’ll need
to use background-color, margin-bottom, and border.
http://codepen.io/team/thinkful/pen/jrWKKO
Selector drill: write one ruleset for sections that gives
them a margin-bottom of 90px, and a second ruleset for
header elements that sets font-family to Helvetica
http://codepen.io/team/thinkful/pen/ZOLmyN

Linking CSS to HTML
We don’t have to deal with this thanks to Codepen
Normally you’d have one HTML file for each webpage
(for example, home.html and profile.html), and a single
CSS file for the whole website’s styles (styles.css)
To link your stylesheet to your HTML, you’d insert the
following line into the <head> section of your HTML
webpage:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="theme.css">

CSS Layout
CSS layout determines how elements are arranged around each other. For
example, Facebook wrote styles to make the nav bar stick to the top, have the
pages and favorites section on the left and the news feed run in the center:

CSS Layout
Key concepts:
Display: inline vs display: block
The box model
Position property

In-line vs block
Every element has a display property set to in-line or
block.
A block-level element always starts on a new line
and stretches to the full width available
An inline element does not start on a new line and
only takes up as much width as necessary
Every element has a default value, and that value can
be over-ridden by setting an explicit value.

In-line vs block
For a full list of inline elements, see: https://
developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/
Inline_elements
For a full list of block-level elements, see: https://
developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Block-
level_elements

The box model & position property
Elements are boxes. We use the position property to organize
these elements/boxes around each other. The position property
has four values:
Static: normal flow. Block elements stack on top of each other.
Inline elements are as large as the content they contain.
Fixed: outside of normal flow. Stays in same place no matter
what.
Relative: normal flow. Unlike static, can use left, right, top,
bottom properties to move the elements around relative to
where they’d otherwise sit.
Absolute: outside of normal flow. Stays in a specific spot on a
page.

Static positioning
Example: http://codepen.io/team/thinkful/
pen/WxGLrr

Fixed positioning
pen/OXRrbJ

Relative positioning
pen/MejZQE
What happens if I change relative to static?

Absolute positioning
pen/vKXPrr
You’ll be tempted to use absolute
positioning to jerry-rig a design. Don’t do
this. Only use it when you’re working within a
small div that’s not going to change a lot.

About you page
Using what we’ve learned today, let’s set up a simple about
me page that includes:
Headline with your name
Small paragraph about you
Image of yourself, or something that you like
Then, we’ll style it using some of the tools we learned.
Some ideas are:
Unique font-family, size, color
Positioning of elements, particularly the photo

About you page
http://codepen.io/danfriedman9/pen/pEOWZA
Let’s walk through the starter code together
Drill: Add another paragraph about yourself
Drill: Add another section to the website similar to the
“About me” section called “About my family” with a
paragraph of lorem ipsum below it

Topics we’re not covering / Where to go from here
More practice… especially with layout
Forms and input
Responsive design
Developer tools
JavaScript for interactivity

Take-home challenges
Expand on your About Me page
Build a resume with semantic HTML
Finish the positioning exercise at end of tonight’s
slides

Learn to learnLevelofsupport
Structure efﬁciency

More about Thinkful
325+ mentors with an average of
10 years of experience in the ﬁeld

Support ‘round the clock

Our results
Job Titles after GraduationMonths until Employed

Try the program for two
weeks, includes six mentor
sessions - $50
Learn HTML/CSS/JavaScript
Option to continue onto web
development bootcamp
Come talk to me if you’re
interested (or email me at
noel@thinkful.com)
Try us out!

Thank you!
Email me with questions or suggestions:
noel@thinkful.com
April 2017

Positioning exercise
Note: we likely will not have time for this tonight.
Build this layout:

Positioning exercise

Positioning exercise: Reasoning about Layout
Images can be downloaded from here: https://github.com/Thinkful-
Ed/css_layout_exercises/tree/solutions/images
Steps:
Break the page down into its components
Pick one to start with (top to bottom, left to right)
List the elements inside of a component
Identify if a given element should be inline or block, and pick the
most appropriate HTML element
Code the ﬁrst element (once again, top to bottom, left to right)
Trick: put a 1px red box around every element with “* {border: 1px
solid red; }”. That will let you visualize the boxes of elements more
effectively.

Frontend Crash Course: HTML and CSS

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