The end of the semester is near! It’s only long-term projects for me from here on out, and I hope I can manifest the time management necessary to get everything done on time. Anyways, here’s what we learned these past two weeks: Sass, Parallax, and Bootstrap.
I have already talked somewhat about my thoughts on the new frameworks in the discussion boards these past two weeks, but to summarize: I think that some of the features introduced in Sass are useful, especially variables, which made their way to vanilla CSS. Nesting is useful to an extent, if you only go like one or two layers deep, but becomes impossible for me to keep track of after that point. I appreciate that it’s “backwards compatible” with normal CSS, all the new features are optional, you can just write normal CSS if you want (and have been hired by some place that insists everyone use SASS).
With Bootstrap, I actually quite like how easy it makes website building, but using it as a crutch has its drawbacks. It reminds me of the concept of abstraction in Computer Science, where more modern coding languages are further removed from the actual machine code or binary or whatnot. The same principle applies here where actual CSS code has been abstracted into variables that can be attached to whatever we want in the HTML. I still think it’s cool though, it’s like the opposite of a CSS reset.
Finally, Parallax is something that I still haven’t really figured out, I have seen it used before in websites for cool transition effects and such, with elements moving at different rates. I kind of wish you could ignore all the 3D complexity and just assign a “scroll speed” to different elements to make them move faster or slower. Maybe there’s a way to actually do that? I was oddly unnerved by the 3D code where my text boxes were suddenly far away, with unelectable text. Too bad you couldn’t also bring them closer to the screen with positive Z values. It would be funny if there was some kind of depth of field effect where objects in the background got blurrier.
Ok, that’s my thoughts on what we learned these past two weeks. Only 4 more to go!