A Rationale for Teaching HTML in a Web Writing Class
Creating web pages necessarily involves a technical dimension that far exceeds traditional writing. As Curt Cloninger points out, "Never before has a medium's technology been so transparent, so 'just below the surface.' Never before have the participants in a medium been so required to learn arcane, technical incantations before they are allowed to communicate in said medium" (Citation Needed).
Some may ask if it is really necessary to learn those "arcane, technical incantations" in order to create for this genre. Why not simply give the students copies of FrontPage or another authoring program and turn them loose? This is a possible solution, but it is far from an ideal one. In fact, I would argue against this option, attractive though it may seem, for several reasons: the reliance of authoring programs on print metaphors, the effect of authoring programs on the creative/thinking process, and the way that authoring programs conceal the nature of the web as a medium.
- Authoring programs and the print metaphor
- Authoring programs and the thinking process
- Authoring programs and the nature of the web
For more on HTML. . .
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.