Lab 2: Web Standards and Version Control with Git

Exercises:

This lab was an overview of HTML5 CSS standards, as well as an introduction to version control with Git. In this lab, we had to:

1. Create a git repository and commit a file.
2. Create branches, merge branches, and delete branches within that repository.
3. We were given an introduction to web standards, HTML5 and CSS3. W3C has a html and css validator.
4. Changing the lab2.html file to be compliant with HTML5.
5. Creating a CSS file to go with the HTML file, and style divs based on id. CSS file was also validated.

This here is the webpage we worked on during the lab. Warning! Deliberately Bad CSS ahead!

Commands and tidbits:

• to stop tracking a file file (which was added with git add), use git rm --cached file.
• To show the list of git configurations, use git config --list.
• To show the log of commits, use git log.
• To unstage a file before committing (but keep the file added), use git reset HEAD file, since git rm will unstage and untrack.
• To create a new branch called latest, do:

  git branch latest
  git checkout latest

  
  or
  
  

  git checkout -b latest

  and git branch will display the current branch.
• One can switch back to the master branch with git checkout, and when you need to merge one branch with another, say latest onto master, one can run git merge latest.
• And then delete that unused branch by doing git branch -d latest

Reflections

I had already used git quite a bit before this lab, having learnt how to use it in tandem with Java during the summer. Therefore, the lab was quite straightforward to follow.

I did learn some intricacies with managing tracked files, which were nice to know and may come in useful later, especially when one only has access to a command line.

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