Best practices

Introduction

This is a brief catch-all section designed to make sure you understand not just what elements and selectors and attributes you CAN use, but which ones you SHOULD use in each situation. When you go visit several "normal" webpages (preferably one that isn't too massively corporate, since they do some abnormal stuff), there are a lot of similarities in the way they are structured (which you can see in your developer tools). They all tend to judiciously use container divs for grouping elements and they use classes and IDs as necessary to determine styles.

You'll also get the chance to review what was covered in previous sections by checking out LearnLayout and doing their exercises.

Learning outcomes

• What is a "container <div>"?

• When should you use <span> vs <div>?

• When should you use id vs class?

• What are good situations for breaking out styles into multiple classes?

• How can you use margins for alignment?

Assignment

Do the exercises for Learning CSS Layouts at LearnLayout

Additional resources

This section contains helpful links to other content. It isn't required, so consider it supplemental for if you need to dive deeper into something.

• Put a box around every div on the page with this Chrome extension by Bradley Flood, or this Firefox extension by Daniel Oshiro. It can help you deconstruct an existing page or debug your own layouts.

• CSS Style Guide by Mark Otto, one of the creators of Bootstrap.

• CSS Reference, a visual guide to CSS, by Jeremy Thomas.