Owning the Page

I believe every student should learn basic HTML, CSS, and the history of the internet. Most of us will never work as developers, and we don’t need to. We write, post, and apply for jobs on platforms controlled by a handful of companies. A few weeks of web basics would show us both how that arrangement works and how to leave it.

My Coding Background

Before this class, I used code to work with data. In econometrics and statistics, I have written R Markdown files that simulate samples, run bootstraps, and print histograms. At my business intelligence internship, I wrote SQL queries that pull records from a database for reporting. My code ran in the background, and someone else read the chart that it produced. I had never built anything for a browser.

What two tutorials taught me

I took the HTML Beginner and CSS Beginner tutorials on HTML Dog. I expected a steep start. Instead, I found a plain text file with tags like <h1> and <p> that label each piece of text, and a browser that draws the page from those labels. The browser forgives the mistakes that R unfortunately punishes. In R, if I forget one parenthesis, the whole script stops. In HTML, I left a tag open and the page still loaded. CSS taught me to keep content and appearance apart. I changed the color of every heading with one line and left the text alone.

Who Controls the page

On platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn, I give up that control. Their engineers pick the layout, the font, the character limit, and which followers see a post. Cory Doctorow explains why platforms can change those rules at will: “When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business.” Students carry huge switching costs. Our friends, photos, and professional contacts sit inside three or four apps, and most of us couldn’t name a single way out.

HTML gives you one. These eight lines use only the two beginner tutorials.:

<style>
  h1 { color: navy; }
  p  { font-family: Georgia, serif; }
</style>
<h1>My Writing, My Page</h1>
<p>No feed decides who sees this.</p>
<p>No terms of service can reformat it.</p>
<p>If this host shuts down, I move the file.</p>

I still need a host to put this page online, but the file belongs to me. If the host raises prices, I can move the file in a few minutes, and my switching cost drops close to zero.

Answering the Question

Squarespace, Wix, and AI tools will build a page for you, but each one locks you into its own templates. The requirement I’m proposing is small. You can read a bank statement without training as an accountant, and you can learn how the web works without becoming a developer.

Tim Berners-Lee built the web as an open system anyone could publish to, and CERN released the software into the public domain in 1993. The platforms came later, through business decisions, and people can reverse business decisions.

Where I land

I don’t plan to become a web developer. However, after two tutorials, I can build a page that belongs to me, and every student should leave college able to do the same.