After finishing Codecademy's navigation design course, I thought it had some interesting information but it also spent too much time on CSS tricks I did not expect to be broadly applicable to future projects. Completing that course also meant I had covered majority of Codecademy's courses under HTML & CSS section of the catalog. However, there are a few items listed that were not "Courses" so I thought I would check out a "Skill Path". According to Codecademy, a skill path is focused on delivering the knowledge necessary to accomplish certain tasks. I paraphrase it as "Teach me what I need to know to accomplish X" versus a course which is more "Tell me about Y and how I might use it."

In practice, judging by my first skill path "Build a Website with HTML, CSS, and Github Pages" (Or the shorter "Learn How to Build Websites" as per the URL) a skill path repackages a lot of components pulled from other Codecademy resources. Mostly individual lessons (modules?) but also other resources like their articles and blogs. After taking majority of Codecademy courses on HTML/CSS, going through this skill path was a little disorienting because their backend had tracked which modules I've already done. This meant that as soon as I clicked on starting this skill path, my progress was immediately over 50% complete. Looking over the skill path syllabus, I could see what I've already done and the gaps I still need to cover.

Most of the gaps were information presented Codecademy articles, covering things like how to set up a code editor like Visual Studio Code. (My personal choice.) Some of the gaps were modules on courses I hadn't bothered to take, for example the command line course as I was already quite comfortable, but I was able to blitz through quickly.

A surprise was the gap on web accessibility. I thought this was an error as I had taken their Learn CSS Accessibility course, but the database is correct: this was a different course with material I had wished was in the CSS accessibility course. Starting with basic background and on to how to set up a screen reader for us to explore how these features will be consumed. I also appreciated more information on ARIA roles, where I learned we can put down some very fine-grained annotations for accessibility. There are a lot more ARIA roles than there are semantic HTML elements. It'll take a lot of learning and practice to do ARIA well, but if the spec is too overwhelming, we can start with MDN's introduction to ARIA.

I was heartened by this coverage of web accessibility but was then disappointed by its coverage of Font Awesome. Which I learned is a huge collection of icons (apparently not fonts as the name implies) available for use in websites. Icons are inherently compact way of visual communication, so we need to pay more attention to their use to ensure they are accessible. Unfortunately, not only did the course not cover how to maintain accessibility, it does not even mention accessibility as a concern when using icons.

One section I'm glad they put in this course is "Documentation and Research". There's no way for the course to cover everything, so it needs to teach people how to look stuff up on their own. For web developers, this means the holy trinity of MDN, Google, and StackOverflow. And for beginners who needed the exercise, a broken web site to fix by looking up the problems.

The real star of the skill path, though, are the off-platform projects. I like learning with Codecademy and its embedded interactive development environment. We can get a lesson side by side with sample code we can play with. However, these are all fairly basic fill-in-the-blank types of exercises. To be a web developer we need to be able to build a page from scratch, which is where these off-platform projects come in. We are given the assets (images and occasionally video) and a specification of what to build, but no templates. We had to create our own index.html and style.css from scratch and serve it up to in a browser to see our results. This course covered developing on the local file system, and using GitHub Pages, but I decided to add one more option to the mix: I thought it'd be a good exercise to setup nginx for local development hosting.