Well, the project has been graded and I got full marks. Which is pleasant.
I did not successfully copy the page I tried to copy, but it is a very complicated page. And some of the effects may be from 3rd party libraries. I guess it’s OK if I can’t reverse engineer drupal in a weekend.
But there are two things that bug me. The instructor is out this week – he has a new baby, squeeeee – but he said we could do office hours next week and figure it out.
The page I’m copying is https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html.
When you resize the page, the menu gets smaller, and then it collapses into a pull down menu bar. The menu is a simple list; I don’t quite understand all the ins & outs of the collapse, but it’s handled by Bootstrap so I don’t have to.
However, it doesn’t quite collapse. The fourth element goes out of the list and stays visible. But here’s the thing – the menu is hidden once it collapses. The 4th element is part of the hidden menu. And yet it is visible. When the menu is visible, I can move that 4th element over. I just can’t figure out how to make it visible all the time.
And then there’s the sidebar. There’s a sidebar on the site; it takes up the entire length and is part of the page structure. At smaller page widths, that collapses into a tab that you can expand, where it floats on top of the page structure.
I didn’t even try. It’s part of the larger page, then it just goes away. It was on my list to figure the ‘remove from the site flow and make this tab bar’ … but it was near the bottom of the list.
I even tried to convince myself it was some 3rd-party add-on, thus letting myself off the hook for figuring it out, but then I found the same menu behavior at http://www.bearlakewatch.com/. And their page is quite slick, but it’s not quite as layered as NASA, and I can ~kind of~ see how they’re doing that collapsing sidebar. But still – really low on the priority list.
There’s also a collapsing sub-navigation bar that I didn’t attempt, the way the main content of the page links, the way images are associated with articles (I just hard coded it – figured that perhaps their content management system is also hard coding it in post processing, and I just had to make it look right).
So these are all important things, yes? Some of them are major structural and functional and highly visible things, too. And yet … full marks.
Of course I am pleased, but I am also somewhat unsatisfied. I want a comment or something that says the gaps were noticed but that they didn’t rise to the threshold of dinging points. Or that the complexity of the rest of the attempt made up for the parts I didn’t figure out. Or something. Otherwise I’m left wondering if the details I think are important are even noticeable.