Chapter 7 is the final core foundation chapter - if you can make it through this chapter with JavaJam, then I am willing to vouch that you can make it to the end of this course. This is the last "hard" chapter, because all subsequent chapters after Chapter 7 are easier due to being relatively "self-contained". Chapters 2-4 and 6-7 keep linearly building up on top of each other's work.
I strongly recommend doing the actual JavaJam assignment. (I honestly do not know why there is an option to do a short essay-like assignment.) You will be missing out on a lot for having your JavaJam site functioning the way it should by the end of the course.
By now, if you have not figured out a workflow with the class, then you can really speed up your process of checking the HTML you wrote with the corresponding sample solution by opening up each respective webpage in your preferred web browser of choice.
(I was using Firefox then, but then transitioned to LibreWolf.)
(I cannot use Brave or Ungoogled Chromium, because I have enabled the Chrome flag for native darkening of the webpage and I also use Dark Reader on both of them.)
I think some website creators forget that more than 90% of mobile devices do not have any sort of stylus (looking at Samsung and its S Pen styluses), so you cannot hover over buttons to access mouse hover activated menus, like on a laptop or desktop.
It is much better to design for a mobile-friendly website from the beginning and from the top down, rather than trying to make your website mobile friendly after the fact. Although I personally do not feel comfortable reading paragraphs of text longer than a "short" 5 sentence paragraph on any mobile device (especially a smartphone out of all devices! Who thought it's fun to read Wikipedia on a smartphone?!?), I think too many websites try to cram too much sheer content onto any given "mobile-friendly" webpage.
The section starts off with relative linking. This is creating a
hyperlink to files or other webpages by going deeper into a
relative file path or by rising up 1 relative level to access an
adjacent directory... this is when I realized this is exactly what
I was doing in "the terminal" (technically terminal emulator
instances). I love how knowing Linux helps you out in surprising
ways in other distant parts of technology, but Windows never leads
you anywhere outside of its closed-sourced, walled garden/sphere of
influence that Microsoft gatekeeps for no reason. (It's the
"trick" where you rise up 1 directory level with
$ cd ../
if you didn't know what I was talking about without referencing the
book itself.)
Also in Section 7.1 is the fragment identifiers - this is how Wikipedia jumps down to the section or subsection you clicked on when you look at an article's "table of contents". It's a bit tedious to write the HTML for a fragment identifier, but it is worth the effort once you have it completely set up.
Apparently one can make hyperlinks to telephone numbers and even sending SMS text messages -- though, to be honest these sound somewhat annoying and would never work on a traditional desktop or laptop operating system. I suppose this could be convenient for a mobile version of a website (such as a result in DuckDuckGo for a real business). I still would only use this functionality if I was using a phone with no Google Play services (so, running one of these phone OSes: GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, or LineageOS for microG).
In Section 7.2, CSS sprites are discussed. I think that the resource management manipulation trick of selectively displaying non-overlapping sections of a sprite graphics file is very clever, though I wished the book would elaborate more how this can be used to keep the size of a plain HTML and CSS webpage much smaller than 1MB. (This was when I learned outside of class that websites become much larger than 1MB once privacy invasive analytics, such as Google Analytics, are added. This is very unfortunate that is considered customarily ok to create webpages much larger than 1-10MB -- not everyone lives in areas of the world with good telecommunications infrastructure with higher than 1Gbps Ethernet speeds...
In Part 1 of Practice 7.5, the image file extension should be
.jpg, not .png.
This section mentions one way to design a mobile web site is to
create a separate mobile-friendly site with a .mobi
TLD. That sounds like the Internet from 2008. No one should do
this technique in 2020 and that is probably not the best way to
implement progressive web design.
After reading this section, responsive images are really cool - once you have written the HTML and made sure it is error free.
In this section, you can finally see it really pays off to create a GitHub Page for your JavaJam site. You can just navigate to your GH Page site to test how well your mobile display functions.
This section reminds me that you need to pay Apple money to develop even open source apps for MacOS/iOS -- this is why I can't even deal with the idea of owning an Apple device.
In Practice 7.10, please ignore the w units for
picture widths in Step #2. I have no idea why the w's
are there.
These sections were semi-skipped in class because they were not emphasized. I believe the CSS flexible box layout was not used as widely before 2017-2018 (when the ninth edition of this book was published) as now - but it is 2021 and it is being used everywhere. Pay attention if you are set to work in front-end web development with HTML and CSS is what I feel is actually the truth. Also, ironically you still need to answer questions about the CSS flexible box layout and the grid layout for the quiz... I guess just use Quizlet search results if you're really stuck?
For the JavaJam assignment, if you truly do not have a physical
tablet and/or smartphone to test your progressive web or mobile
friendly site, then you can simply simulate a phone/tablet display
by changing the dimensions of Firefox/Chromium with the mouse.
(There's also the actual mobile device simulator when you press
F12 in Firefox or Chromium for the browser console,
a.k.a. the "developer's area", if you feel like exploring that,
too.)