Book Image

The HTML and CSS Workshop

By : Lewis Coulson, Brett Jephson, Rob Larsen, Matt Park, Marian Zburlea
Book Image

The HTML and CSS Workshop

By: Lewis Coulson, Brett Jephson, Rob Larsen, Matt Park, Marian Zburlea

Overview of this book

With knowledge of CSS and HTML, you can build visually appealing, interactive websites without relying on website-building tools that come with lots of pre-packaged restrictions. The HTML and CSS Workshop takes you on a journey to learning how to create beautiful websites using your own content, understanding how they work, and how to manage them long-term. The book begins by introducing you to HTML5 and CSS3, and takes you through the process of website development with easy-to-follow steps. Exploring how the browser renders websites from code to display, you'll advance to adding a cinematic experience to your website by incorporating video and audio elements into your code. You'll also use JavaScript to add interactivity to your site, integrate HTML forms for capturing user data, incorporate animations to create slick transitions, and build stunning themes using advanced CSS. You'll also get to grips with mobile-first development using responsive design and media queries, to ensure your sites perform well on any device. Throughout the book, you'll work on engaging projects, including a video store home page that you will iteratively add functionality to as you learn new skills. By the end of this Workshop, you'll have gained the confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious web development projects.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
2
2. Structure and Layout
3
3. Text and Typography
5
5. Themes, Colors, and Polish
6
6. Responsive Web Design and Media Queries
7
7. Media – Audio, Video, and Canvas
12
12. Web Components

Introduction to CSS Preprocessors

In the previous chapters, we learned about many aspects of HTML5 and CSS3 web development, including layouts, themes, responsive web design, media, animation, accessibility, and so on.

Inherently, CSS has its own issues with maintenance, particularly with large or complex projects, not to mention that it's limited in terms of its ability to process functions, logic, and variables. CSS preprocessors came about to address such issues and more, extending the capabilities of CSS to help the developer achieve more with less while keeping the code maintainable.

Now, you may have heard of CSS preprocessors such as Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets (SASS), Leaner Style Sheets (LESS), Stylus, and others. These are all scripting languages that allow you to achieve more in CSS by writing less. All these CSS preprocessors have some logic in common, such as the ability to have variables, nesting styles, math calculations, reusable mixins, and so on...