AO3 base HTML or advice with learning more CSS specifically for it?
So apparently, being fed AO3 recs on Tiktok with an adorable site skin leads to me finding and applying said skin, and then proceeding to expand upon my limited knowledge of HTML and CSS.
TLDR; I want to expand my HTML and CSS knowledge specifically for creating AO3 site skins but am stumped at the moment. advice requested.
Let me explain; when I was a child, (think summers from 2nd/3rd grade up until I went to middle school and an after school club in 4th/5th grade) I was in camps/clubs where I learned how to code.
it started with block coding when they introduced it in the computer lab In early elementary but I took a liking and asked my parents if I could keep doing it. I eventually learned how to actually type up some code, understand what a good amount of it meant, and got to the point where I knew how to make Minecraft and Roblox mods (they were the most popular at the time). once I hit middle school, a lot changed in my life and I kinda fell off the coding enjoyment. I tried to take a class for it in my 8th grade year but it was Boeing and covering basically a bunch of stuff I already knew. now, here I am, 5 years later, reading fan fiction with an altered site look due to applying a bunch of CSS code to my account.
Now, the current skin I have was copied and pasted code from another creator on here and even though I didn't write it myself, it got me thinking about how much I actually understood.
when I opened up the various CSS files, some made more sense than others. the ones that have lines like:
body {
font-size: var(--txt-size-main);
color: var(--txt-main);
}
make sense to me to an extent. this is the kind of thing that I did over and over again in these camps and classes, altering either some or most of it and expanding as time want on. digging deeper, I found things I hadn't seen either ever, or it'd been a long time. so I did some digging. found a few sources for articles that explained various commands, detailed how to string them together, and showed how they looked when applied to HTML.
the issue now is, I need to understand the HTML I'd be applying CSS to before I can know exactly what it is I need to do research on. I'm currently looking for AO3's basic HTML behind their site, but it's more difficult than I expected lol. I'm testing with basic HTML and CSS in a playground program right now and it's helping refresh my memory on the punctuation and language that's being used but that's about it.
if anyone has any advice on what to research or look up in order to find the original HTML source or anything else that's helpful to specifically making AO3 skins, please lmk! any advice is welcome!
