Mar

31

PBS 52 of X — Introducing Bootstrap 4

Filed Under Computers & Tech, Software Development on March 31, 2018 | 1 Comment

This post is part 52 of 92 in the series Programming by Stealth

In this first instalment back after our month-long hiatus we change tack completely, moving away from JavaScript altogether, and diving right back into HTML and CSS.

One of the golden rules of programming is not to waste your time needlessly re-inventing the wheel. This is the driving motivation behind the development of many open source libraries. The aim is to give programmers a leg up by providing pre-built foundations for them to build on. The best example of this approach we’ve seen so-far in this series is jQuery. Today, I’m going to introduce you to another one, Bootstrap.

Out of the box, all versions of HTML, even HTML 5, have some significant short-comings:

  • The default style is just plain ugly!
  • There are no simple tags for creating complex page layouts.
  • There are no simple tags for facilitating responsive design (same page displayed differently depending on screen resolution).
  • Some basic elements and behaviours common to many web pages are not provided.

Bootstap aims to solve all these shortcomings using a combination of mostly CSS combined with a little JavaScript.

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Mar

3

PBS 51 of x — Cellular Automata Wrap-up

Filed Under Computers & Tech, Software Development on March 3, 2018 | 1 Comment

This post is part 51 of 92 in the series Programming by Stealth

This instalment will be the last before we go on hiatus for a few weeks while Allison goes off exploring Europe. When Allison comes back we’ll be changing gears and switching for focusing on JavaScript to focusing on HTML and CSS. We’ll learn about the free and open source Bootstrap 4 CSS library. This library provides many useful features, but we’ll start simple. Firstly, the library providers modern and elegant default styles for all the HTML elements we already know and love. It also provides a handful of simple CSS classes for defining page layouts (columns, rows, that kind of thing), and thirdly, it provides simple CSS classes for creating so-called responsive web pages, i.e. pages who’s layout changes automatically depending on screen size.

As this is the last instalment before the hiatus we’ll use it to wrap up our work on the Cellular Automata prototypes. We’ll start with a sample solution to the challenge from the previous instalment, and finish with a worked example where we use our prototypes to create three distinct CAs.

The final code for the worked example is included in this instalment’s ZIP file which you can download here.

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