• Nothing in particular, but I feel like it's hard to memorize all the information.

    That's understandable. The goal is not to memorize, per se. These things will get stuck in your head with practice. It's not easy, but you'll get there.

  • Why is firefox, the best browser to use? But I don't have many questions at the moment.

    I'm not sure best is the word to use, but (1) it's what I use, so I will best be able to help you if you use it, (2) I will give all my examples and directions using Firefox, so you'll have an easier time, (3) it has a very good set of debugging tools, though others have good ones as well, (4) it's not commercial, and as a professor I don't like recommending commercial products, and (5) it's not spyware.

  • Can you talk more about what span does and how it differs from div / I'd like to know more about how to use the span tag as I've never heard of it before.

    Great question. Elements (tags) fall into two categories: block elements (boxes) and inline elements (text). DIV is the generic (non-semantic) block element. SPAN is the generic (non-semantic) inline element.

  • I'm a little bit confused about SPAN and what its purpose is. I understand that it's an inline element, but I'm not sure I completely understand what that means.

    I'll draw a picture.

  • Do span tags have to be nested inside paragraph tags, or can you have all of your inline text in a span element? If you can, then why would you use <p> when you could use span?

    spans need to be inside block elements, and are typically inside paragraphs, but that's not the rule.

    SPAN is not a substitute for P.

  • why use span and div when we have semantic markup?

    Fantastic question! Yes, we should use semantic tags if one is appropriate. We use the generic ones when there isn't an appropriate semantic one.

    Suppose you need to mark parts of the text of an article as (1) key points, (2) new vocabulary, (3) doubtful statements, or .... There isn't an appropriate inline element for any of those. But we could use:

    etc.

  • For each hyperlink in the Ottogram example, why would it been better to use figure and figcaption. What are the disadvantages of using img and span? How to we decide between the two?

    figure and figcaption are better because they are semantic.

    We still use img; there's no substitute for that.

  • What exactly is <meta> and what it is used for. I see the definition says "used to say what character set the page uses; we will *always* use utf-8", but I am still a bit confused.

    "meta" is information about the document. There are a bunch (author, keywords, etc).

  • Why do we use UTF-8? I know it says always but Im wondering why.

    There are other choices, but UTF-8 has many advantages and the world seems to be converging on that.

  • What does "attribute" mean? Why do some tags have attributes written after them while some don't? Do all tags have attributes?

    Attributes add additional information to a tag. Some attributes apply to every tag, such as class and style. Some are specific to particular tags, such as src and alt for img.

  • More examples of nested tags and when they should be used or not be used?

    Let's draw a picture

  • doing examples of when to use each tag

    We'll see examples throughout the course.

  • can we change the spacing? Can we come up with our own elements? For instance, if I want to divide my section using 8 hyphens, do I manually type 8 hyphens each time, or can I define an element and use that instead.

    I don't understand this question. What do you mean by "spacing"?

    We can't add new tags to the HTML language. That's decided by the W3C: the World Wide Web Consortium.