Days 6-7 of the 100 Days of Web with Python involve recreating Google’s search page from 1998 (the logo belongs to Google, of course). It was a pretty fun exercise but didn’t take me very long. I did cheat a little (I looked at the HTML file on Google’s page in 1998 to see how they did their tables). Once I stopped thinking of a table as an Excel spreadsheet-like thing, it really made recreating the page much easier. Since it didn’t take me very long to get the basic page recreated, I decided to go ahead and work ahead. Here is my Github repo for this project.
Day 8 asks you to create a simple form for someone to register on Google (or something like that) and not worrying about style too much. Here is my form:
As you can see, it’s pretty basic. I think it’s really nifty that the input field can auto validate different types, including e-mail and date. Of course the form looks kind of ugly right now. I don’t particularly like how the date input is clearly a different size from the others. So after a quick Google search, I came across the style=”width:” and set each of the input boxes to the same width:
Still not perfect, but better. That’s one of the things I love about this stuff. If I don’t know how to do something, I can just look it up and generally find an acceptable way. What I don’t like is always wondering if the way I did it is the ideal way or the industry standard. That second one in particular really matters to me as a teacher. I do my best to teach my students in industry standard ways, or at least what I think they are. Sometimes a solution on Stack Exchange may just be a hack, and not really the right way of doing something.
This dilemma of industry standard practices has to be one of my constant struggles. Since I have 0 experience in industry, I’m never 100% sure what I’m teaching is a best practice. I base most of what I teach on blogs, online tutorials, and books, so I would like to think the people who write these things know how programs are written in the industry, but maybe they don’t. I mean, they have to at least know more about it than me right? But then again, here I am blogging and some new person might see my code and think I know what I’m doing. I wonder if everyone feels this way. I’ve heard it called “imposter syndrome”. Maybe I’ll do another post about that another time.
Daily CS 