My Little Rainbow

Problem Statement

In this lab, we're going to make a rainbow with HTML <div> elements. And while we do it we're going to learn about HTML elements, CSS styling, CSS selectors, how color works in CSS, and importing stylesheets.

Before we start, here's some basic info about HTML and CSS. Skip to Make a Rainbow if you feel comfortable enough with HTML and CSS.

Review HTML Basics

Hyper Text Markup Language, or HTML, is a way to structure a document with different parts. Each section of content is marked by elements (using tags). Each element has its own special meaning that the browser uses to render the HTML document. Use this cheat sheet on HTML elements for guidance.

Elements

All begin with < and end with >, e.g., <div> (this last part is a tag).
Most have an opening tag such as <div> and a closing tag </div>.
- The / indicates to the browser that that tag is a closing tag.
- The element is everything between the tags and the tags themselves.
Some tags are self closing like the line break element <br>.
Elements can have IDs and classes to aid the browser in finding specific tags.
- Must begin with a letter A-Z or a-z.
- Can be followed by: letters (A-Za-z), digits (0-9), hyphens (-), and underscores (_).
- IDs can only be used once per page. E.g.: <div id="this-special-div"></div>.
- Classes can be used as many times as you want. E.g.: <div class="a-less-special-div"></div>.
Elements nested inside other elements are called children.
- Children inherit attributes from their parents.
- Don't nest everything.
Elements next to one another are siblings.
- Siblings do not inherit from one another, but are important for selecting in CSS.

Here is an example of element relations:

<div>  <!-- the parent element -->
  <p></p>  <!-- the first sibling element/the first child-->
  <p></p>  <!-- the second sibling element/the second child -->
</div>

Review CSS Basics

Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, is a language created to style HTML documents by telling the browser how specific elements should look. CSS does this by selecting elements based on their tag, ids, classes, or all of the above. The reason for CSS is the separation of concerns. We want HTML to focus on the structure and meaning of our content. We let CSS worry about how to make that information appear clear and engaging.

CSS selectors

They select elements to assign them styles.
* (wildcard) selects every element.
An element, such as div, will select all elements of that type.
They select an id like #some-id
Classes are selected like this .some-class
To select all children elements of a parent do something like this div p
To select multiple different elements separate them by commas like this div, p, a

Here's an example of CSS styling:

* {
  color: red;  /* color in CSS refers to font color */
}  /* all elements will have red font */

Make a Rainbow

In the directory you'll see three files: index.html, main.css, and this file, README.md. Start the web server using the httpserver command. Using another tab in your browser, navigate to the "launched" web server and add /index.html. The URL should be something like 10.0.0.1:41234/index.html.

If everything is working correctly, you should see a white page.

Good job!

Making the Divs Visible

If you look at the file in your text editor or use the inspector, you'll see that the basic HTML structure is present in index.html. So why can't we see anything?

Well, divs are structural elements. They're used to invisibly group other visible elements together. But the stylesheet that would tell our divs to do something a little different hasn't been linked yet!

Let's fix this by adding the stylesheet to the head:

<head>
...
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="main.css">
...
</head>

Link is a self-closing tag that will create a relative path with the href attribute. A relative path means the browser knows that the main.css file is in the same place as index.html. The head is a hidden part of the page that tells the browser where to find any other files it needs to display the page correctly, the title for the tab, and any other possible important information.

Now if you refresh the index.html page in your browser you should see a perfectly Goth solid-black rainbow.

We got the basic outline because in the main.css all the div elements were selected and given a border whose color is #000, "black." While we could set color: red;, we will have more colors available if we define colors without words.

Instead of red, green, or the exotic tomato, professionals prefer a set of numbers with a base pair of 16 rather than a base pair of 10 like we use everyday. These numbers are called "hexadecimals" and we can use them to make a wide range of colors.

Some Stuff You Should Know About Hex Colors (and Web Colors in General)

Hex colors begin with # and are followed by, generally, 6 numbers, but some of these numbers are actually letters. The lowest single digit number in hex is 0 and the highest single digit number is f. This table might help to visualize what we mean by this.

Decimal Numbers:      0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
Hexadecimal Numbers:  0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,  a,  b,  c,  d,  e,  f, 10

Hex colors work by creating Red, Green, Blue (RGB) values. Traditional RGB colors are on a scale of 0 to 255 for each of the three colors in the spectrum. Hex colors are considered true colors since they can represent ~16 million colors—but your eye can only see 10 million of those. So #000000 translates to black since 0 reds, 0 green, 0 blues represents the absence of all colors, and #ffffff makes white since 255 reds, 255 greens, and 255 blues is the maximum of each of the colors.

Hex colors can be shortened to just three numbers when each RGB value is the same for each digit. So #11dd99 can be written as #1d9.

Coloring the Rainbow

To get ROYGBIV onto our rainbow we'll need seven hex colors. Red: #f00; Orange: #ffa500; Yellow: #ff0; Green: #00bc3f; Blue: #06f; Indigo: #8a2be2; Violet: #d300c9

All we have to do next is select each div individually and apply each of those colors. That is a perfect use for ids since they're meant to style one specific element only. We need to add an id for each div, so a logical name for each div would be the color that they have to be. It could be something random, but good names make for semantic code. So let's give the outermost div the id red.

<div id="red">
  ...
</div>

To give that id some CSS attributes we'll go into main.css, select the id, and mark its color as red.

#red { /* this selects any elements with the red id */
  border-top-color: #f00;
}

To make sure the rainbow isn't so monochromatic you now need to repeat the above steps with the final six colors, and when you do you should have a complete, colorful rainbow.

Moving On

When you're done with this lab type learn at the terminal. Make sure you pass the tests. Once they pass, type learn submit and you'll be ready to move on!

Conclusion

After we reviewed HTML and CSS basics, we moved on to create an HTML rainbow. We linked our stylesheet to our HTML page and added ids to our HTML elements. We then created CSS rules, using hexadecimal color values, for those elements to display all the colors on our completed HTML page.

View My Little Rainbow on Learn.co and start learning to code for free.

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