Gonna go for a walk

Learning is coming slowly but I am progressing nonetheless. My newest project is 50 lines total including HTML. Not a lot, but some of the lines took forever to figure out. Simplicity is key to good design anyway. Thankfully I am able to ask questions on the Stack Overflow website.

It would be good to post actual code and walk through my process.

Moping in code

I hope I'm not a "that guy" in class. Yeah, I've read a few books. Who cares.

I feel like the next few classes will be good.

The next thing

Newest project:

Button: add blank text box
Click text line: change to text box
Escape in text box:
- If nothing stored, remove
- If info stored, remove changes, restore info
Enter in text box: change to text line with info
X button by text box/text line: remove
Text format: number of item, item name
+ and - button by text line: increase/decrease #
Hide + button at 4
Hide - button at 1

User will enter a number and a string. The code will separate the number from the string to manipulate it, then add it back to the string when finished. If the user doesn't enter a number, the number will automatically be 1. Any number over four will be reduced to four.

Example-driven learning

Wouldn't it be great to have a Javascript site that gives examples and explanations for real-world problems? "How do I make a text box that responds this way?" "How do I do such and such?" It would be about simple things that can get a new programmer going.

First class

My first Javascript class was as exciting as you'd expect the first day of class to be. We went over the syllabus and each student introduced themselves. Pretty boring stuff, but I'm sure it will get interesting soon.

I've tweaked the web site but I haven't added anything new yet. So far tonight I've updated the Text Echo page to reject empty strings and remove white space from the beginning and end of the string. I'll see about taking it to the next step tomorrow.

Where to go from here

I've put out my first attempt at a web site. At the moment it's very bare, but it's got three links and it works. The problem is when I looked at it on my mobile phone it was very small and didn't fit well on the screen without zooming. Yes, my friends, I've noticed the harsh difference between mobile and desktop web viewing.

The first thing I did was to Google ways to make simple CSS adjustments that would take into consideration the user's screen size, but I couldn't find a simple answer. I need to scale my divs and text size depending on the screen size of the user.

Where do I go from here? Do I have to turn to Javascript "if" statements for CSS values? Do I need to learn a specialized language for this sort of thing?

I've been putting off learning Jquery and such because I wanted to get the basics down first. I figured that once I knew what I was capable of in basic HTML/CSS/Javascript then I could specialize in one or more of the offshoot languages. But maybe that isn't the way I should be going after all.

Is "program streaming" the future?

If web pages and internet connections become as fast as the other programs on your computer, will all programs be on the web? Why install something on your hard drive when you can get the same experience in your browser? Security issues are the only problem I can think of at the moment, and I'm not even sure how relevant that concern is. I suppose some developers might balk at having their code be open source, although it seems possible to make the code unreadable to most.

It feels like this is an inevitability. If that's true, then good web developers should be easily employed and handsomely paid. Hopefully that will be me in a few years time.

Javascript gaming?

I've never seriously thought about browser gaming. Since it is something that can't currently be done well in the same way as console gaming and yet it seems like an inevitability, shouldn't I consider getting involved as a possible future career?