From A to: Keywords of Markup
Table of Contents
The purpose of a nonbreaking space is to create a blank space between two characters that cannot be separated by a line break. The reason for using a nonbreaking space is to deny text wrapping between characters. Although this is an example of the standard use of the nonbreaking space, is also often seen as being overused by nonprofessional Web designers as a means of quickly getting blank space onto a Web page. An example of the more standard use of the nonbreaking space is in French, where a question mark is separated from the rest of a sentence...
Imagine, if you will, a Web page author in 1995. Armed with a working knowledge of HTML 2.0, a text editor, and a computer, he crafts his first Web page. Making mistakes, correcting them, forgetting elements, replacing them, he plugs on, determined to make a page that works!
He finishes the file, names it, copies to his rudimentary server—a speedy 486—breathlessly trots to a computer five feet away, loads the earlygeneration browser, and . . . eureka! There in front of his eyes is a Times New Roman masterpiece, innocent of any knowledge of Web page design, its...
, A BASIC HTML TAG used to delineate and manipulate the writing spaces of the browser, has been denigrated by usability experts and effectively excommunicated from Web design. Supplanted by Cascading Style Sheets and content management systems, frames became archaic, a vestige of markup language that no longer holds currency in contemporary usage and design. The tag has disappeared from most current uses of markup language. The frame, however, has not. Literally and figuratively, Web writing, design, and representation remain framed in a number of ways that are both generative and restrictive. Frame is still a keyword for considering...
and the Aesthetics of Online Space
In 1997, David Siegel declared war on the horizontal rule (
), a popular HTML tag used to create horizontal lines across Web pages. Siegel, a self-styled provocateur and graphic designer, had published successive editions of his popular Web-design guide, Creating Killer Websites, in 1996 and 1997. In that book, he heralded the rise of “third-generation site design,” which purported to do away with the text-, icon-, and menudriven layouts of the early to mid-1990s. The
tag was among the first design elements he wished to discard; Siegel argued that the creators of early Web pages had overused horizontal rules...
There is no longer any doubt that bodies inhabit, produce, and function as code. Whether genetic, semiotic, or mechanic, the body is constructed and interpreted as a series of complexly interactive codes that contribute to the creation of what we might call a subject. Similarly, the tag in Hypertext Markup Language assists in the creation of what we might call a subject on the Web. The
tag operates at the semantic and local levels of HTML (or XHTML) to demarcate the content of a Web page. It functions as a boundary within the code, indicating where the content...In an age of writing and code, we are all mystics. In my capacity as a teacher, I am the imparter of mysteries, the encoder of information. My favorite moments have neatly bookended activity in my Web writing, design, and development classes. The first is the moment of revelation, the pulling aside of the curtain: I stand at the podium, enter a URL, and then choose “View Source” in the browser. Students gasp. It’s very satisfying.
My second favorite moment occurs at the other end of the class. A student (not a Web designer; perhaps a human development major, or...
The Web can be conceptualized as an aggregation of disparate sites; as Lev Manovich suggests, virtual spaces “are most often not true spaces, but collections of separate objects” (253). However, in this chapter, we propose that the Web is not simply an assemblage of data, but rather that it is a collection of active places that individuals construct in their minds. We argue that without imagery (that is, without the tagging capabilities) the Web would be less able to facilitate rich, recognizable, and communal narratives. Without pictures, icons, photographs, and other graphical representations, it would be conceptualized as more...