mendax.org

To be honest, I don’t recall the exact name of the first book I ever read on learning HTML, but it was one of those “learn HTML in x y”, where ‘x’ is a number usually from seven to twenty-four, and where ‘y’ is a unit of time played by actors such as “hour”, “day”, or “week”. Suffice to say, I learned HTML that way, back when web sites didn’t have colorful backgrounds, animations of any sort other thank blinking, and before What-You-See-is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editors like FrontPage and tools now built into hosting sites. Things were nice and calm on the World Wide Web (WWW) back then, but then The Awful happened.

This post-HTML-1.0 era consisted of WWW-sprawl, when ISPs started offering hosting packages for monthly fees, then one-time payments. Then Geocities offered free web sites, and it was over - The Awful had happened, and every wannabe-geek in cyberspace had their own web page, usually with nothing at all useful on it. If these web sites actually had content, 90% of it was rehashed from somewhere else, and despite what the current Blogophiles say, Blogs began before the word “Blog” was invented.

It went something like this: Johnny Webmaker registers with Geocities and makes a web site. With nothing to write about, he writes about himself. No one really cares who Johnny Webmaker is, nor do they care what Johnny Webmaker thinks or likes. Nonetheless, Johnny Webmaker has an inflated sense of self-importance, so he puts together whole pages of links to other stupid sites, and at the end of the day, we have Web Rings that link from Johnny Webmaker to Jenny Webspinner to Jared Linkoholic.

See where I’m going with this? The only thing modern blogs have over personal homepages of the old days is more continuity, and fortunately, that means more content, despite the fact that it’s more content no one really cares about. And, just as with the old days, someone influential sifts through the dirt that is the WWW and occassionally comes across a site with decent information, and sources it in a proper publication. Yep, blogs are homepages, they’re of similar ink.

What annoys me, however, isn’t that every kid with a keyboard and Internet connection can throw up a web page, but rather how they do it. If it’s not Javascript errors or silly popups annoying me in 1995, it’s embedded media errors and advertising animations in 2005. And, across this vast decade of Internet evolution, we still have text that’s barely readable on badly-colored backgrounds, embedded music and sounds that can’t be turned off, and a shit-sprawl of text splashed across the screen as though kids don’t learn how to format text on a piece of paper in elementary school.

Yes, the WWW is a wonderful thing, and the Blogosphere, or whatever the hip-kiddies call it these days, is a great thing to have around. Yet, if anyone who just registered an account at myspace is listening, read a tutorial on HTML. Don’t do it because I say so, do it because you make yourself look stupider than you really are. And trust me, with words that alternate in lower case and capitals, and using slang and shortcuts for words that take a negligible amount of time to key out properly on your ‘board, you look dumb enough as is.

Oh, and pull your pants up, ’cause you look like you couldn’t find the bathroom.

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