I've been revamping my blog over the past two days. I actually wouldn't call it revamping.. that implies that I did a full-on makeover and added lots of spiffy stuff. No, I've just been tweaking on what I've had so far, and now I feel that it's easier to navigate and looks cleaner. I never bothered to learn CSS until I was forced to dabble in it at work, and I can say that it's helped majorly. The last time I tried a full-on revamping on blogger I got lost in all the CSS but now I get to use it to my advantage. What I never realized before is that it enables a separation of presentation and content, just like what I'm trying to do in my app. An example is how I made any code I post on here a CSS class, so instead of manually formatting it every time I just go in the HTML and set it to a div class. That approach bears an odd resemblence to DataTemplates in WPF.
It's just like my dad told me when I took my first few CSE classes - "The more you know, well, the more you know". That is so true in computer science. And a bit discouraging to novice programmers - the amount of information that you know you don't know is just overwhelming. But I've found that basic principles are common to all flavors of coding. I had previously dismissed HTML and CSS as mindless tools used to quickly patch up a website, unaware that the two used together are characteristic of the functionality and simplicity of a powerful and well-known programming paradigm.
