Lab 12 Reflection


     Lab 12 was a rapid research lab about a file format. The first thing we did was choose from a list of file formats to research about. In this lab I choose to research ZIP files. Once we choose our format we needed to research an overview of what it was, a history of its development, a method of compression it uses, and the pros/cons of the format. The research was done online with important facts and sources being written on a handout. Once we gathered all our facts we drafted 4 paragraphs, each paragraph focusing on a category we researched.

     Once our 4 paragraphs were drafted we needed to make a web page about our file format, with the contents being the paragraphs we drafted. This was the simple part of the lab as once we set up the HTML page all we needed to do was create headings for each category using the heading tags and copy and paste our paragraphs in between <p></p> tags, making sure the paragraph is underneath the correct heading. Our page was bare, however, as it lacked any style. To give it a style I linked it to an external stylesheet like I did in Lab 10. In between the <head> tags I set up the <link> tag. The rel attribute of the <link> tag was stylesheet and type attribute was text/css. The stylesheet I used was the stylesheet I used to style my entire website, or DD portfolio. This stylesheet was not in the Lab 12 folder so to link to it my href was "../../main.css". This is a relative path which basically tells the site to step back from the Lab 12 folder into the Labs folder, step back again from the Labs folder into the DD folder, and search for a CSS file named main.css to link to. The result of this linking was my web page having a style, which made it look less boring, and looking similar to other lab pages I styled using the same style sheet, creating a sense of unity within my portfolio.
     These skills are important for a web designer since a web designer must be able to navigate through directories correctly. I couldn't make this web page have a unique style since it needed to look like other webpages on my site. To to this I needed to link it to the site's main stylesheet which was not in the same folder as the web page for the lab. While I could just make a copy of the main stylesheet and put it in the lab folder to link it I will be making the file size of my website's directory larger than it needs to be. It's also an inefficient process to just make a copy of the main stylesheet every time you create a new web page. Knowing how to navigate a directory, however, eliminates the need to make copies of the same stylesheet and makes the process on introducing new web pages more efficient. It allows a web designer to reach files they need in a web page from anywhere in their directory, allowing a more efficient work flow and eliminating unnecessary bulk that comes with constantly copying assets.
   

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