HTML Basics

So it's 1989 and you're working at CERN. The internet exists, technically, but all it is is email and file transfer protocol. You could type up all your theories about the Higgs Boson and save it to a flash drive floppy disk, walk around and copy it to every machine, but the campus is large and Switzerland is cold so you guys have set up a network drive. You can store your text document on the server in the server room and eliminate walking altogether.

BUT that's just text. This is great in theory but you want to do the actual work of reading research papers- That means you have to be able to navigate them. So you write some software that converts the phrase <b>BUT</b> into BUT. You call this hypertext.

Hypertext is pretty cool. It provides semantic structure to your text documents. You can use headers to divide sections of your papers, and all the squares who still open the paper as a text document can still read it, even if it's mildly unpleasant. But the cool cats? The people hip to the scene that use the software you wrote? They can browse the files in a browser which will render the tags you've included in your document.

For example, if you mark certain text as a header with <h1>, it'll be rendered

like this

and that can be different for each viewer. Maybe that means larger fonts for smaller screens or something like that- You don't care. What you care about is that the reader knows it's a header and they can render headers in whatever way suits them. You don't need to figure out pagebreaks and margins and such- You just declare the content of your message and let renderers worry about rendering.

There are two more important innovations before the web apocalypse:

1. Linking. Now that you have sections, divisions, etc, you want users to be able to skip to the content that is relevant to them without having to scroll througheverything. Instead of remembering a page number or a line number, simply include an 'id' attribute in the tag, like <p id="theGoodParagraph">, and then you can create links that lead to theGoodParagraph. In fact, that link can even go to other documents, like "To determine the acidity of the sample, we used <a href="anotheruniversity.edu/chemdept/profcoolguy/essentialtechniques.html#litmus-tests">Litmus Paper<a>." And now, in the middle of your paper on one thing, an interested reader can follow a link to another paper. The 'a' is for Anchor, href means Hypertext Reference, and the # symbol separates the document from an anchor within the document.
2. Images. Lots of research needs to include graphs or samples, not just tables and ASCII art. So, they created the img element. And just like that, the web was over.

Because at this point, you could make a profitable Skinner Box. Instead of thousands of experts using text based browsers to express themselves and understand each other, the web became a place where you could show someone what they wanted to see in exchange for money. And all that mattered was that you get the money, so the reader doesn't have to understand HTML anymore. If you can get someone to pay you for showing other people an ad, you don't even need to know how to get money from the reader.

At this point, the web becomes an offensive playing field. If you can get someone to click something, that's a win. We're no longer prioritizing legibility. In fact, legibility could be a hinderance. It was a pain before to have to download an entire document and navigate it to see what an author was referencing, but now it couldn't be easier- Just click! If the result is little more than an ad, I can just use this handy new 'back' button. Users don't even know that they're looking at documents. We layer in things like javascript and php to make it less and less clear that what you're engaging with is a document sent over a wire, not a program running on your computer. It refreshes on its own and shows the current time and behaves like video- Video! Let's start doing videos, too!

The tragedy is that we're still using a language that wants to be understood, in its heart of hearts. But there's no market demand for understanding a webpage. It's possible, but unecessary and not stylish. Hit Ctrl+U to read the next part.