It’s getting chilly now! It’s dark out so early now, and I’ve broken my gloves out, so despite the fact that I’m a Canuk, it is beginning to feel like winter… Between a massive batch of soup (which I’m now fighting for space to store!), and copious cups of tea an hot chocolate, I’m managing. 😛

Today Is day five of my Code School programme; I’m sticking to tackling a course in one day, followed by a day of review. So yesterday was spent re-watching the videos, going over the challenges, and writing notes- yup! Actual, physical notes. In a notebook. I know that I learn best when I talk about something, so I’ve been going over some of the elements and attributes and explaining when to use them in my own words [which has also meant there’s been a healthy amount of googling going on!]

One of the things I did a bit of further research on was the correct usage of i, b, em, and strong tags. *Spoiler Alert* the i and b tags are used to offset text primarily visually, while em and strong are used to offset text semantically. So you might use <b> to make the name of your product or some key words stand out from a text, but you’d use <strong>  to denote importance, say, a really shocking statistic in an article maybe. In the same way you’d use <i> to make words visually different- certain kinds of names (like dinosaurs!), names of boats (no getting the Queen Mary and the Queen Mary mixed up!), foreign words, or thoughts, and <em> is used to add stress emphasis- basically if you’d pronounce it differently.

There are a few other tags as well, like <cite>, which have specific uses… Safe to say it’s been an educational day! I’ve been trying to stick to reputable sites today [an awful lot of opinions- some of them pretty outdated, flying around!] so I had the Mozilla Developer Network open for a fair portion of my afternoon!

This all seems like fairly basic stuff, so I’m glad that I’m spacing out the courses a little and doing some research on my own. As keen as I am to tear through the courses (course number three today!), I know that my understanding of the topics covered is so much better after that second day.

Now, onto that course! Hopefully everyone else is feeling equally motivated!