I've just completed the "Make a Website" lesson on Codecademy, because it made sense to start at the beginning and (re)learn the fundamentals. I knew some simple HTML going in so I had expected part of it to be review and part of it to be new material.

The review part was expected: the lesson went over basic concepts of HTML tags and their hierarchical structure, then went into fine-tuning appearance via CSS.

But the new material was a surprise. After the CSS unit completed teaching about backgrounds and borders and spacing, it promised the next unit is about content and page layout. I thought "OK, good, now we're getting into stuff I don't know."

The next unit began by introducing the Bootstrap framework to manage page layout. It was still an informative and fun interactive lesson, but I was left disappointed by the departure from HTML fundamentals.

It felt incomplete, like a math class that skipped doing addition with pencil and paper and instead going straight to using a calculator. Yeah, I'm probably not going to do it by hand ever again, but I wanted a lesson to teach me how to do it at least once. I would have preferred the lesson to go a bit into doing HTML layout the hard way, then say "Now that you know how to do it the hard way, let's do it the easy way with Bootstrap." Doing it both ways would give me a better feel of how HTML layout works and how Bootstrap makes it easier.

The Codecademy lesson worked as advertised, I'll just have to fill this hole in my knowledge with something else.