Week 2 Lab Assignment

In my opinion, all students should study the basics of web programming languages and the history of the internet. It’s not necessary to make students professional programmers, but a little knowledge of the inner workings of the web can give people more independence when using technology. Considering the fact that so much of our content creation and consumption happens on corporate-controlled websites, it is important to know what happens on these websites. Before this class, I had some experience in programming in an intro CS class where we were working with Python. It taught me how to think logically and how changing some elements of code influences the result of the program. This assignment was different from my previous experiences because now I’m using code to create my own website. With HTML, I learned how websites are structured, and in CSS, how the appearance of the website can be modified.

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>
    <title>My first web page</title>
</head>

<body>
    <h1>My first web page</h1>

    <h2>What this is</h2>
    <p>A simple page put together using HTML</p>

    <h2>Why this is</h2>
    <ul>
        <li>To learn HTML</li>
        <li>
            To show off
            <ol>
           	<li>To my boss</li>
         	<li>To my friends</li>
           	<li>To my cat</li>
           	<li>To the little talking duck in my brain</li>
           </ol>
       </li>

        <li>Because I've fallen in love with my computer and want to give her some HTML loving.</li>
    </ul>

</body>

</html>

The article “Social Quitting” written by Cory Doctorow made me see why it is important to learn such skills. Doctorow says that one of the goals of commercial social media platforms is “to make it as easy as possible to switch to their service, and second, to make it as hard as possible to leave.” It shows how big corporations can take control over their users by making them dependent on their platform. However, learning the basics of web programming does not solve this issue, but it gives people more information about how the web and the opportunity to create something on their own.

In general, I think that web development should be taught to all students at a basic level. Even though HTML and CSS are not skills that everybody will use in their professional life, they can make people independent and informed web users.