Markup

Started the week with some seemingly simple and mundane task of fitting some extra content into our course pages, but as it often (if not always) the case there were more things to consider than it first appeared. Working out all the possible variations of content, getting the likely amount of words, sourcing images and ultimately forming an opinion about what the purpose of the content is all need to happen before you put the stuff on the page to meet a need. So that was fun.

The next thing in the week was a useful excursion into a Gruntfile in one of our repos. I started with two main ideas,

• improve my knowledge of what it’s actually doing, since I’ve felt that I haven’t really understood it as much as I should.
• see if I could make it easier to use.

After a few trials of various things it seemed like I ended up back where I started, but with some understanding gained along the way. On the face of it not super productive, but I needed that confidence boost of having learnt something.

Later in the week I got my teeth into a pretty fun stuff - semantically marking up events in html and referring to Schema.org for ideas. Whilst doing that it struck me that lots of the vocabulary we use on a daily basis when describing processes are already well described and that it might be a good thing to refer back to move discussions along. It can seem that we are prone to reinvent the wheel when naming things (which is famously hard) and being clear and obvious in the early stages of building things can only be good. If it turns out that you can’t be clear in the early stages, then it’s a sign that you you need to work things out.