• 6 AN ACCIDENTAL IMPERATIVE: The Menacing Presence of  
    6 AN ACCIDENTAL IMPERATIVE: The Menacing Presence of   (pp. 81-97)
    Brian Willems
    https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctttv58b.10

    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...

  • 7 THE EVIL TAGS, AND : Two Icons of Early HTML and Why Some People Love to Hate Them
    7 THE EVIL TAGS, AND : Two Icons of Early HTML and Why Some People Love to Hate Them (pp. 98-110)
    Bob Whipple
    https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctttv58b.11

    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...

  • 8 ING REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WEB
    8 ING REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WEB (pp. 111-124)
    Michelle Glaros
    https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctttv58b.12

    , 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...

  • 9 BREAKING ALL THE RULES:
    and the Aesthetics of Online Space
    9 BREAKING ALL THE RULES:
    and the Aesthetics of Online Space     (pp. 125-149)
    Matthew K. Gold
    https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctttv58b.13

    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...

  • 10 BODY ON : Coding Subjectivity
    10 BODY ON : Coding Subjectivity (pp. 150-166)
    Jennifer L. Bay
    https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctttv58b.14

    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...

  • 11 : “Invisible” Code and the Mystique of Web Writing
    11 : “Invisible” Code and the Mystique of Web Writing (pp. 167-185)
    Helen J. Burgess
    https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctttv58b.15

    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...

  • 12 FROM CYBERSPACES TO CYBERPLACES: , Narrative, and the Psychology of Place
    12 FROM CYBERSPACES TO CYBERPLACES: , Narrative, and the Psychology of Place (pp. 186-212)
    Rudy McDaniel and Sae Lynne Schatz
    https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctttv58b.16

    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...

  • 13 ING THE GRID
    13
    ING THE GRID (pp. 213-227)
    Bradley Dilger
    https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctttv58b.17

    When the Web exploded in popularity in the early 1990s, the responsibility for building Web pages fell on a huge variety of people: programmers, prepress specialists, graphic designers, illustrators, even writers and editors. With few established best practices, design was fragmented. Overnight sensation David Siegel called for flashy “killer Web sites,” and usability specialist Jakob Nielsen all but called for him to be killed. Many Web designers had no formal training, and the Web sites they created often mixed alignments, colors, typefaces, and graphical styles indiscriminately. Furthermore, individual rendering of a given design varied much more widely than today, and...

  • Afterword: CASUISTIC CODE
    Afterword: CASUISTIC CODE (pp. 228-236)
    Cynthia Haynes
    https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctttv58b.18

    At first glance, it was a killing machine. Not that I’ve seen that many. Like so many of the exhibits at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, knowledge and the everyday artifact re-presents an abject form of information lurking in the pins and punch cards that recorded details about everyday people. This particular machine was manufactured by the Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft (Dehomag), a subsidiary of IBM. According to Edwin Black, thousands of these machines were situated in various camps during World War II in the camp’s Labor Service Office, what prisoners at Bergen-Belsen called “the lion’s den” (IBM 20). Hole...

  • CONTRIBUTORS
    CONTRIBUTORS (pp. 237-238)
    https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctttv58b.19
  • INDEX
    INDEX (pp. 239-246)
    https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctttv58b.20