Expanding, Exploring, and Encoding: Learning HTML in LIS488

Posted March 9, 2021 by Andrea Everett

After an hour of arranging files, furiously Googling, and pleading with the technology gods, I thought I had it. With trepidation, I typed the following line:

<img src=”Springsteen.jpg” alt=”Cover art for Born in the USA” width=”500″ height=”500″>

I refreshed the page. BOOM! I’d successfully embedded Bruce Springsteen’s iconic backside into an HTML document. I looked at my fair-use image, set against a white background and flanked by black Times New Roman font, with pride: it was rudimentary, but I made it!

Could you accurately list the number of websites you’ve visited in the past week? Of course not. Technology has been so seamlessly integrated into our lives that we are often unconscious of its influence. This has only become truer since the lockdowns began: between virtual happy hours, classes, and job application portals, most of us are conducting more of our lives online than ever before. Like the face mask, the computer has become an ever-present defining symbol of this era.

I’ve spent so much time online. And yet, before taking LIS 488, I had never analyzed the source code of my favorite websites, much less wondered whether they were styled with CSS.

The average (non-techie) person knows so little about the technologies they use every day. Though I consider myself reasonably conversant in tech, 488 has made me realize how little I know. If uploading a simple .jpeg to a web server feels sophisticated, what worlds lie within the applications in my Mac’s doc? By the end of the semester, I will have built a personal website from scratch. And when I do… I’ll be on fire.