Learning any programming language is learning how to debug it. But the wrong command in Python often returns an error message that keeps the code from running, not something that fails very well but surprisingly, exceeds the intentions of its creators. With HTML, we are all Doctor Frankenstein.
One of my all-time favorite websites is the Embroidery Troubleshooting Guide. These days it’s only available through the Internet Archive, unless (like me) you have a local copy. On the surface, it looks like a typical, if outdated, small business website. But when you look down, you immediately notice something unusual about it. The text, all centered in alternating red and green Arial, gradually becomes larger, with phrases forced to wrap around lines or reach the edge in the middle of a word, filling the screen like Alice trying to get through smaller and smaller doors in Wonderland. .
If you look at the source code (have other programs made it easier to view the source like a website?), you’ll quickly find out where it went wrong. Each line of central text begins with
or
header tags are not closed. Each header tag—which establishes only a relative, not an absolute, portion of the semantic richness of the dynamic web grammar—builds on the last, creating ever-increasing puppets. A tag designed to describe the sequence of documents works, creating chaos. The fact that the words themselves are about how the threads can break and why makes it poetry.
On its own, the Embroidery Troubleshooting Guide would be a clever enough piece of found concept art. But by viewing the source, downloading the file, and replacing the instructions for solving common sewing problems with any text you like, you can make that masterpiece your own. I like to include my favorite poems, take them apart and force myself to read them with new eyes.
“Broken” sites like this suggest a huge success of semantic HTML. As it developed, semantic HTML increasingly separated structure from presentation: Instead of tags, which specify exactly whether the text is presented in italics, we use them tags to indicate emphasis (or tags for titles of books or movies, etc.). These features may be presented as italics on a computer screen but read by a screen reader in a different tone. The Embroidery Troubleshooting Guide hacks the semantic tag and makes it present something unexpected. The same building blocks that allow a single website to be displayed responsively on a small phone or giant television screen can make a website unplayable. This is exciting.
I appreciate the use of content management programs and complex sites that generate HTML dynamically, but there is joy in building sites with simple HTML files that you can edit by hand. I still organize my own website this way, adjusting it to see all the tags, categories, and subcategories. I also like to edit my ebooks, turning PDFs into well-formatted HTML-based EPUB files that are never published to anyone: my private library of self-contained websites. At the height of the epidemic, editing these files and their style sheets by hand was a balm.
Finally, since HTML has become the province of experts, it cannot be supervised. This is what makes many programmers so concerned about the web, and sometimes sadly eager to take care of the very real walls they have erected between software engineers and web developers. But people who write HTML know that paragraphs are meant to be exploded. All it takes is a marker that doesn’t close where you least expect it.
What some programmers can say without regard to what HTML lovers accept: Anyone can do it. Whether we use complex frameworks or very simple tools, the promise of HTML is that we can create, execute, code, and do whatever we want.
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