Making Something From Nothing

Not everyone needs to learn to code.
I came to this conclusion while coding nothing.

…

Well, nothing visible, that is. I did the two lessons on HTML Dog yesterday. The first was on the span and div element, the second on metadata. None of these elements mean anything specific unless you or the browser makes it meaningful. They are used to group, tag, or otherwise section off pieces for the author (or the browser, in some cases). Now, most what I actually learned is unimportant here. However, their lesson on span was particularly enlightening. I think that the element very nicely captures how I feel about modern web development and the “everyone should code” movement.

First, an explanation of span. As an example, compare these two blocks of code:

<strong>Scoreboard:</strong>
<p>Home: <span>110</span></p>
<p>Away: <span>150</span></p>

<strong>Scoreboard:</strong>
<p>Home: 110</p>
<p>Away: 150</p>

Both produce the following (sans the border and padding)

Where span is useful is when one wants to label a short section of text or content without having to start a new section of code. With our previous example, let’s say we wanted to make the font size of the score 3pts bigger than the default font. Also, let’s make the font monospaced. We can use span to style the score while keeping the rest of the line the same:

<strong>Scoreboard:</strong>
<p>Home: <span class="score">110</span></p>
<p>Away: <span class="score">150</span></p>

.score { 
font-size: calc(1rem + 3pt); /* rems are relative to the current root font size */
font-family: monospace; 
}

This is the result:

Now, what does this have to do with the universal learning of programming on the web?

Span very nicely encapsulates why the theoretically forward-thinking idea will in practice crash and burn. Whereas a bookmaker is entirely focused on what is visible, and how the layout is presented literally, a digital author thinks in sections, variables, and classifications that are not immediately meaningful to the viewer. Someone who works in Digital Humanities puts on a programmer hat, an artist hat, and a writer hat all at once. Not everyone likes to wear that many hats, or even any single one of those hats, and that’s ok!

• Doctors are very important, but I wouldn’t sign up for medical school if you payed me for it.
• Fashion designers make it, so I don’t have to learn about style and stuff when picking the clothes I want to wear.
• Movie Directors can tell crazy visual narratives, but outside of the filming and acting, the level of organization that putting the components together requires may kill me

There are many different skills that can be learned in life, and some people are drawn to different things. Programming and Web Development are two great examples of skills. For sure, it should be very accessible for someone to learn the trade, however, someone who really wants to be a lawyer doesn’t need to know about the use cases of span. A major plus of living in a large society is benefiting from the hard work of others around in exchange for your own contributions and creations. Take this quote from Julian Lucas:

 “At recess in middle school, while others played soccer or traded Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, I pored over tomes on HTML, JavaScript, and PHP“
_{Lucas, Julian. “Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It.” The New Yorker, September 29, 2025}

It was awesome that he found joy in pouring over the technical documentation. He learned how to make contributions to his community through doing so. But it’s also OK that nobody else around him did the same thing. The other people will eventually go on to find their own skillset that is different than Lucas, therefore contributing in unique ways.

I, for one, really like programming. I’ve partaken in Carnegie Mellon’s National High School Game Academy, contributed to quiz bowl tools used by many across the nation (my name is on the credits page of qbreader.org), followed along with Bob Nystorm’s Crafting Interpreters, and have accomplished some truly epic things with regular expressions (including a couple more than a paragraph long.) Even with the current state of AI, I expect that at the very least (if AGI replaces us all) I will continue to program recreationally. Making stuff is fun.

But even within the field, there are parts I have no interest in learning. I’ve never cared to look into Cybersecurity, for instance. Cool field, and lots of active R&D within, but someone else can learn it and have their own fun.

The span element is best used carefully to highlight a narrow piece of content. Humans are, in a weird forced metaphorical sense, like span. We first find things we are drawn to, and (only) after self-identification, specialization, and stylization, we contribute to the field and make it different.
_{I actually sort of hate the metaphor but it’s a nice way to end the article, so we are going to end it here.}