Learning HTML and CSS seemed easy to learn and master at first. Completing the assigned reading and completing the Codecademy course made HTML/CSS sound straightforward. However, in practice, I have learned how complex and frustrating it can be to work with these languages. When it comes to CSS especially, I feel as though there is a lot of trial and error. You tell it to do something, open the html file in a browser, and see that it has either failed to move at all, or it is doing something completely unexpected. Additionally, if you look up on W3 or other resources on how to accomplish one task, you may find that it may not work depending on what other properties you have given your html element. Either way, there are many different properties that can be applied to an html element, and it feels as though you may never know the true result of pairing any of those properties together.

In the end, it takes me multiple tries to accomplish a new task. There have been times where I wanted to make a simple change—center an embedded video or clip part of an image—and it took me hours to figure out how to do it. Sometimes I just give up. There have also been times where I wanted to try a new property in CSS only to find that it did something completely unexpected. But for each frustrating reload and mistake made, I knew I was learning a little. Even if it was a property that I didn’t end up using, I remembered what it did and all the unexpected outcomes it yielded. And eventually, small things that used to give me a hard time got a bit easier. And every now and then I come across a problem where I end up using an old property that I gave up on before.

This kind of trial and error learning reminds me a lot of the Karate Kid. Daniel begins his martial arts learning by doing all of these obscure and seemingly useless tasks for Miyagi, from waxing the car to painting the fence. At the end of the movie, he realizes that he actually learns, practiced, and developed the muscles to apply some very fundamental fighting techniques. Unlike Ruby and Javascript, HTML/CSS did not come easily and as straightforward. It took countless failures and the chasing of red herrings to accomplish a task. But at the end of the day, I realize how many of those “failures” were actually unexpected outcomes that I ended up remembering and using in other situations where it applied.

I am far from even coming close to mastering HTML/CSS and I know there are more frustrating failures ahead of me. However, upon looking back, at least I can find comfort in that with each failure I am learning and with each unexpected outcome, it could just be practice for another situation it will be perfect for.

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