Learning any programming language is learning to debug it. But a malformed command in Python usually returns an error message that prevents the code from running, not something that fails brilliantly but monstrously, surpassing 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 is only available. via internet archiveunless (like me) you have a local copy. At the top, it looks like a typical, if somewhat dated, small business website. But when you look down, you immediately notice something strange about it. The text, all aligned in the center in alternating red and blue Arial, grows larger and larger, with phrases forced to wrap around lines or reach the edge mid-word, filling the screen like Alice trying to fit through increasingly larger doors. little ones in Wonderland. .
When you view the source code (has any other program made it as easy to view source code as a website?), you’ll quickly discover what went wrong. Each line of centered text begins with
either header tags that never close. Each header tag, which only sets a relative, not absolute, size, part of the semantic richness of the web’s flexible grammar, builds on the last, creating progressively larger nested dolls. The tag designed to define textual hierarchy goes haywire, creating chaos. The fact that the words themselves are about how and why threads can break makes it poetry.
On its own, the Embroidery Troubleshooting Guide would be a pretty clever piece of concept art. But by viewing the source, downloading the file, and replacing the instructions for solving common sewing problems with whatever text you want, you can make that work of art your own. I like to include my favorite poetry, decontextualize it and force myself to read it with new eyes.
“Broken” sites like these upend the great achievement of semantic HTML. As it developed, semantic HTML increasingly separated structure from presentation: instead of tags, which strictly specify that a text be presented in italics, we use labels to identify emphasis (or labels for book or movie titles, etc.). These elements may then be presented in italics on a computer screen, but a screen reader may read them with a different intonation. The Embroidery Troubleshooting Guide hijacks a semantic tag and presents you with something unexpected. The same building blocks that allow a single website to display responsively on a tiny phone or huge television screen can make a website fundamentally unviewable. This is delicious.
I appreciate the usefulness of content management systems and complex sites that generate HTML dynamically, but it’s a pleasure to create sites from simple HTML files that can be edited by hand. I still edit my own website this way, arranging it so I can see every tag, section, and paragraph break. I even love editing my own eBooks, converting PDF files into beautifully formatted HTML-based EPUB files that are never published to anyone – my own private library of independent websites. During the height of the pandemic, editing these files and their stylesheets by hand was a balm.
Ultimately, even when HTML has become the territory of professionals, it cannot be controlled. This is what makes so many programmers so hungry for the web, and sometimes pathetically desperate to maintain the all-too-real walls they’ve erected between software engineers and web developers. But people who write HTML know that hierarchies were created to explode. All that is needed is a tag that does not close where expected.
What other programmers might say with disdain is something that HTML lovers embrace: Anyone can do it. Whether we use complex frameworks or very simple tools, the promise of HTML is that we can build, create, code and do anything we want.