The acronym tag and other css adventures

I was wrong.

Somewhere along the line, I got the idea that women did CSS and HTML and men did “real” coding like PHP, SQL, Python, Perl, javascript etc. Since life had taught me that predominantly male fields always paid better than female ones (construction workers get paid more than licensed practical nurses, for example), I decided to ignore CSS beyond the minimal amount to get by because seriously, real programming has arrays and functions.

Getting the pages in the game to all look alike was one of those tasks I put off until later, and maybe we would just hire someone to do it. Well, guess what, later has arrived. So, I spent a day reading Stylin’ with CSS (which rocks, by the way) . The main motivating factor was that I had to do some test questions for our game that match up to the type of items on the new computerized exams testing the Common Core curriculum. This means that I needed things draggable and droppable – no problem with jquery – but I also needed them laid out very specifically on a number line. I could have done this with the canvas tag, but really, css proved the perfect solution.

Not only was I able to use margins, relative positioning and float to get my objects on the page to show up exactly how I wanted them, but I was also able to do it so that I am pretty sure it will look the same in most browsers on most computers and not just my lovely cinema display using Firefox.

On top of this, I learned about the acronym tag which I could not believe I did not know existed before now. (Yes, I know it is an HTML tag but it was in a book on CSS I happened to be reading.)

In short, you do this

<acronym title="What you want to show up when you hover">The thing you hover over</acronym>

In our games, we use many words from the students’ tribal language. For example, for the game we are going to be piloting on the Turtle Mountain reservation this spring,

Nookomis says …

and in 100 places in the past, I had used javascript so that if you clicked on or hovered over something it would show the word and here there was a simple little tag all along.

How was it possible I did not know this? Because I had the stupid idea that CSS was a woman thing and if you want to make money in life and be taken seriously you hire someone at a low salary to do the things that women do and you concentrate in other areas.

I was wrong about CSS and that was the second thing involving stereotypes about women that I was completely wrong about this week. The other one was a book on women in fitness. You can read about that here.