Week 2: Lab Reflection

My answer to the question of whether students should learn to code for the web in the current state of “content creation” on corporate-controlled platforms is yes. Learning these skills is not about providing human resources to corporations and platforms, but about better expressing our thoughts, ideas, and subjectivity through the internet. By learning HTML, CSS, and the history of the open web, students gain the ability to look beneath the sleek interfaces of commercial platforms, resist control, and even express themselves. Today, the internet is essential to everyone’s life; it has invaded everyone’s routine, and it shapes everyone’s thoughts, beliefs, and knowledge. Therefore, learning the history of the internet and the fundamentals of web languages can help students adapt to and understand the logic behind how current society works. Moreover, it is also crucial to learn about these if we want to speak to our society and other people through the internet. Just as Berners-Lee said in his conversation with Julian Lucas,

“We can build a new world in which we get the functionality of things like Facebook and Instagram, and we don’t need to ask for permission.”

Julian Lucas, “Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It,” Annals of Technology, The New Yorker, September 29, 2025.

Learning web languages and web history enables us to express and create independently without having to “request permission” from enterprise platforms. My prior coding experience mostly focused on coding with languages like Python, C, and Kotlin, which mostly compile and run locally on the device and serve to solve certain problems or mathematical questions. This is my first time learning HTML, which is a more direct and straightforward type of language that focuses more on the display of text on a web page. This exploration is new and exciting to me. It gives me insight into how to use coding as a tool to express myself through HTML coding and what building a new site is like.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
<style>
body{
font-family: "Times New Roman";
border-left: 4px solid #4a7c59;
background-color: #f9fbf9;
padding: 15px;
font-size: 14pt;
}
h1{
border-style: dashed;
border-width: 3px;
border-color: red;
}
</style>
 <h1>This is a place where I can express whatever I want.</h1>
	<p>This is my digital free space.<br>
	I can design it as I want to.</p>
	
	<p>Unlike corporate social feeds, I can link to any resource freely on the open web, like...</p>
<p>I am taking this course this term:<br><a href="https://hh2026f.amason.sites.carleton.edu">Hacking The Humanities</a></p>
</body>
</html>