For Browser History 1, after two attempts I was able to complete the Workout of the Day in less than 15 minutes reaching the Rx time. I took about 12.8 minutes to complete the tasks. In this WOD, I created an index.html showcasing “A history of browsers” utilizing multiple html tags to form my page. Of the three WODs this one was definitely the easiest. I had prior experience using HTML when I took ICS 101 and I learned even more about HTML when I was an assistant teaching assistant for ICS 101 the next semester because I had to know how to teach it to the students. I didn’t need to watch the screencast; however, it took two attempts for me to complete this WOD because after watching my first screencast, I realized that I had forgotten to include my tag. The best advice that I can give based on my experience with my first workout of the day is to make sure that you have all necessary tags that are needed to create an html document (Doctype, html, head, body,etc.) as well as the closing tags. A quick and easy way to create all those tags automatically is by using the Emmet abbreviations in VS Code. If you want to easily create an HTML document, you can use the Emmet abbreviation. To do so, you can create your file with the .html extension, then type an exclamation point “!” and enter and it should come up automatically. This definitely saves a lot of time and assures you have all necessary basic tags.
For Browser History 2, I created a CSS page to change the style and format of my index.html. This WOD was definitely the hardest amongst the three for me. It took me seven tries for me to complete the WOD within the Rx time. For my last attempt, I completed the WOD in 5.7 minutes. After attempting the workout for a couple of times on my own, I decided it was time to look at the screencast. While the screencast was super helpful, I still wasn’t able to figure out what was going on. After every attempt, after I referenced and applied my CSS page, my HTML page wouldn’t update with the changes that I created. I checked my index.html file locally by dragging the file straight from my computer to a browser and noticed that the CSS changes were there; however, when I would make an http request to get that file from the server, the CSS updates wouldn’t be there. Eventually, I just decided to try to explain my situation in Google and I found out that the page doesn’t always update fully, so you have to force it to refresh. For PCs users, they can do Ctrl + F5 and Mac users can do Shift + Command + R. I feel as though I may not have been the only one who had problems with this, so my advice for this workout of the day and for other projects using HTML and CSS is if your HTML document doesn’t seem to be updating with your CSS rules, you can force refresh your browser.
For Browser History 3, I had to change my CSS so that my three sections were split into three columns instead and make my table of contents horizontally spread across the top of the page. This WOD was challenging and it took me 5 tries for me to get within the Rx time. I was able to complete the WOD within 9 minutes. For my first couple of attempts, I didn’t know what tags and properties to use. I had to watch a little of the screencast in order to figure out what I needed to do for it. Then, my next few attempts were more of me trying to figure out what I needed to do to fix small details of the layout of my page. This includes things such as correct spacing horizontally and vertically. It was quite frustrating and time consuming, but after I was able to finally find out what would work for the page, I was very satisfied with it because I was able to learn through trial and error. Even during my final and best attempt, I was making many spelling errors which conflicted with what I was trying to do. My advice to others would be to make sure that you are spelling everything correctly and exactly how it is supposed to be. Though these WODs were challenging and tedious, I definitely feel good after learning how to do them.