Authoring Programs and the Nature of the Web
Authoring programs become a way to avoid a fundamental fact: the web is a code-driven medium. Moreover, web code—HTML, XHTML, CSS and their related scripting languages—is more than simply a means to an end, like the programming languages behind software. These tags are an essential property of the web, the way in which information is relayed. Knowing how they work is part of knowing how the web works, and denying our students that knowledge denies them entry into the full dimension of web creativity. For example, one of the most lively discussions currently taking place across the web relates to the adoption of Cascading Style Sheets and the "semantic web" (see Berners-Lee, et al.) that separates presentation and structure into different aspects of a site (see, for example, Owen Briggs, et al., Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation). This conflict is also related to an ongoing dispute between the disciples of usability, such as Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool, and the disciples of design, such as Curt Cloninger and Hillman Curtis. The outcome of these debates will affect the way the web looks and functions in the foreseeable future. Indeed, the shift to Cascading Style Sheets has already had a noticeable effect on web design (see Chris Kaminski; also the links to sites using "tableless" minimalist layout). But this debate is fundamentally code-based. Students who use FrontPage or (to a lesser extent) Dreamweaver will have little choice in how or whether Cascading Style Sheets are used on their pages, nor will they be aware of the differences involved in the two school of design.
Without an understanding of HTML code and a sense of the way in which it works, our students will have no sense of this ongoing debate, nor the reason for its hotly defended positions. Yet this debate is changing the way web pages look and are read—and it has a fundamental relationship to the web's future and the way new information will be conveyed. This debate is also tied to more profound theoretical issues, such as the nature of control in a hypertextual environment.
By assuming that writing for the web is essentially the same as writing for paper, we overlook the rich texture of the debate over web code and its future, which remains one of the fundamental features of the web as a genre. As Jeffrey Veen points out, tags are "metadata [that . . .] talk about the semantics of a document" and allow us to "manipulate our content" (Art and Science of Web Design 22). If we want our students to be able to manipulate that content without an intermediary, we need to include web code as part of our web writing courses.
Citation Format:
Batschelet, Margaret. "Learning To Love the Code: HTML As a Tool in the Writing Classroom." The Writing Instructor. 2004. http://www.writinginstructor.org/files/batschelet/
(Date Accessed).
Review Process: Margaret Batschelet's
hypertext was accepted for publication following blind, peer review.