HTML & CSS Guide

Bernard Opiyo — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 10:27:14 +0000

HTML
HTML stands for Hyper Text markup Language,which is the most used language on web to develop web pages.
HTML was created by Berners-Lee in late 1991 but "HTML 2.0" was the first standard HTML specification which was published in 1999, followed by HTML 4.01 in late 1999.The current version is HTML-5 which is an extension of HTML 4.0 and its version was published in 2012.

Hypertext Refers to the way in which web pages (HTML docs) are linked together. As the name suggests HTML is a Markup Language which implies that you use HTML to simply "mark-up" a text document with tags that tell web browser how to structure it to display.
Initially HTML was developed with the aim of defining the structure of documents like, heading, paragraphs , list, and so forth to enable the sharing of scientific information between researchers.
Currently HTML is being used widely to format web pages with the help of different tags available in HTML language.

Contents of a basic HTML Doc
!DOCTYPE html
html-start
head start
title-start This doc title end-title
head-end
body-start
h1-start This is a heading end-h1
p-start Document content goes here....end-p
body-end
html-end

HTML Document structure in Details

The !DOCTYPE Declaration the declaration tag is used by the web browser to understand the version of the HTML used in the document.The current version commonly used is HTML5. 2._ Heading tags_ Any document starts with a heading, in HTML you can have six levels of headings, which use the elements; h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,and h6.While displaying any heading the browser adds one line before and after that heading.
Paragraph tag It offers a way to structure your text into different paragraphs.Each paragraph of the text should go in between an opening "p"tag and a closing one. 4.Line Break tag When using a "" element, anything following it starts from the next line.The line break tag is an example of element where you don't need an opening or closing tag.The break has a space between the characters "br" and the forward slash which when omitted it will be difficult for the web to render the line-break.
You can center your content using "".
Horizontal lines They are used to visually break-up sections of adocument. The "" creates a line from the current position in the document to the right margin and breaks the line accordingly.

CSS
Cascading Style Sheet is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in HTML or XML.
CSS describes how elements should be rendered on screen , on paper, in speech or even other media.

Steps in CSS
CSS is used to style and layout web pages such as to alter the font, color, size, and spacing of your content. splitting content into multiple columns, or even adding animations and other decorative features.

CSS is built on cascade and inheritance, all the selector types, units, sizing background and borders, debugging.

In CSS you also look at text styling fundamentals including setting font, boldness,italics, line and letter spacing, drop shadows and other text features.

You can go father and look into modern layout tools like flexbox, CSS grid, and positioning and also add legacy techniques.

Version Control Systems

Bernard Opiyo — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 07:46:27 +0000

Version Control also known as _revision control, source control or source code management _is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents and large websites.
Vcs records changes to a file or set of files over time so that you can recall specific versions later.

Version control systems are most commonly run as stand alone applications.
Reasons to use version control system

To be able to manage changes on the source file and also manage and support team development.
Version control remembers the history and hence you can always return to earlier versions if you have screwed up the current file.
Version control also allow us to organize and make co-ordinate changes to the code base and supports co-development across system borders.
You can always return to earlier version since it remembers the history. *Most Integrated Development Environments(IDE) offer support for one or more version control systems.

Types of version Control systems

Local Version control systems
This is to copy files into another directory, the approach is common due to its simpleness but its very prone to error. As it is easy to forget which directory you're in and accidentally write to the wrong file or copy over files you don't mean to.
Centralized version control systems which were developed to enable people to collaborate on code and documents with people on different systems that may not share a common file system.The systems include CVS, subversion and perforce have a single server that contains all the versioned files and a number of clients that check out files from that central place.

3.Distributed systems
Here the client mirror the complete repository and not just the latest version of each file. The user then synchronize local repository with the copy on the server.The disadvantage of distributed system is that the local repository of various users on a project can be very out of sync with each other making the job harder when the versions have to be merged again.Example of this system include Git.

Process of implementing Git
If having a linux system, Git is most likely already installed on your system. On macOS, git is available through Xcode which is not always the most recent version. On windows you can use WSL.
Downloads for all systems are available on the download section of the main git website.
The Eclipse IDE comes in with built-in support for Git through the standard plug-in EGit.

4.Cloud services
These are companies which offer hosting services for open source projects or have a free access for academic accounts. Examples includes Github, Gitlab and SourceForge.

Importance of using Cloud services
*It ensures that the code is stored safely off-site.

Git and mercurial are systems that are maintained and supported by various hosting services for example vcs provides training in Git. *Centralized version control systems have asimler concept than the distributed ones.
It also allows you to check which systems are supported by an IDE before using it.

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HTML & CSS Guide

Version Control Systems