Musings

Intro

I’ve written a lot about animations, from choosing the appropriate method to limiting browser reflow, but have never made a any basic tutorial because I haven’t had much reason to. But now I see that it could be useful to get people started down the right track.

I highly recommend checking out my post on beginning web development if you’re at all interested in learning how to program for the web. It should be quite useful to you!

Throughout this tutorial I’ll be writing code in the post itself, but I am also making the assumption that you’ll follow along in a separate window using CodePen, a web compiler of sorts. I also assume you know a tiny bit of HTML and CSS, but if you don’t you should still be able to follow along. It’d be best to make sure you’re using a modern browser as well so we don’t have to worry as much about browser prefixes.

Please branch off from the tutorial to test out things! That’s a great way to learn exactly what’s going on.

Let’s get started!

I’ve learned there is one surefire way to become good at practically anything:

Surround yourself with people who are better than you and material that is beyond your understanding — the more advanced the better.

This is not something new to you; you know it well, even if you don’t think so. We all know how to become better at something, but we’re lazy. So, today I hope to provide reasons to not be lazy about it.

There is no better teacher than experience.

I’m still a relative newcomer to the programming and web development world. I started actively doing web stuff including programming and design around the time I started using StackOverflow, 22 months ago at the time of writing this.

StackOverflow helped me get my base foundation doing web stuff when I didn’t have a teacher around to guide me (which, looking back, I’m thankful for). I thought of things differently then and was unaware of techniques that I know now. Having people answer specific questions I had and getting help applying them to my situation helped me understand the thought behind the concept as well as reduced the time it took to find the answers myself.

StackOverflow was a big part in landing my first internship and

Why should I not use a table for my layout?

This question has been discussed on Stack Overflow as well as many other sites. I’ll summarize the main points here.

We should use tables, but only for tabular data because it is incorrect, and more difficult to use tables for layout.

Nowadays I see that the majority of websites are using JavaScript for their animations. I remember the days when Flash was usually used to fulfill those tasks.

Questions:

1. What are the advantages of using JavaScript instead of Flash? Yes I know about the performance, but are the other advantages?
2. Web developers could use JavaScripts at that point in time, why did they choose Flash anyway?