I don’t think all students need to learn how to code for the web. It’s useful for people who want to become developers or designers, but for everyone else I think it’s becoming unnecessary. AI tools can already turn a plain English description into working HTML and CSS in seconds. Because of that, web coding should be something students choose to learn if they want to go into that field, not something every student is required to do.
I’m a CS major, so I already had coding experience before this class, and that’s actually part of why I feel this way. I chose to learn to code because I want to work in that field, and getting good at it takes a lot of time and practice that most students don’t need to spend. For this lab I did the HTML Beginner and CSS Beginner tutorials on HTML Dog. They were pretty straightforward for me, but they reminded me how much of web coding comes down to small details, like closing every tag and putting a semicolon after every property. Those are exactly the details an AI tool handles instantly. The code below is simple for me to write by hand, but someone with no coding background could get the same result by asking an AI for “a centered navy heading with a line under it and a paragraph with some padding.”
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Joshua's Page</title>
<style>
h1 { color: navy; text-align: center; border-bottom: 2px solid navy; }
p { padding: 10px; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to Joshua's Page</h1>
<p>I made this after the HTML Dog beginner tutorials.</p>
</body>
</html>Big platforms control a lot of what we see online. Cory Doctorow’s column “Social Quitting” explains why it’s so hard to leave these platforms. He writes that when switching costs are high, services “can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business.” I agree with him, but I don’t think knowing how to code fixes that for most people. I could write a perfect HTML page tonight and I’d still be on the same apps as my friends, because that’s where they are. When Facebook helped people leave MySpace, it was engineers building a tool for everyone else, not everyday users coding their way out. Understanding how these platforms work matters, but you can learn that without writing a single line of code.