It’s hard to face one’s own irrelevancy.
I decided to sit down this afternoon and learn me some web codin’. How hard could it be, really? I used to code web pages back in the day, and it wasn’t that hard. Of course, I cheated like hell and used a WYSIWYG editor. I don’t think I ever learned exactly how every HTML tag works, but I knew that web pages were basically like Word documents that you could link together and deconstruct in a good old ASCII reader, like the Windows Notepad.
There was something charmingly democratized about the old HTML standard. It was really the only code you could look at without knowing dick about it and still make out a blurry picture of what was happening. In other words, it was kind to newbies and right-brainers. Well, the left-brained nerd cabal that developed Extensible Markup Language and Cascading Style Sheets had just about enough of that open-door bullshit. The code for XML and CSS looks like it was torn from the bowels of a C++ compiler.
I downloaded what promised to be a “WYSIWYG CSS editor,” and quickly wondered what the hell happened. Apparently, there is a conspiracy against developing a modern, pedestrian-level, point-and-click web page editor that does not require a pretty hefty understanding of code already. I’m sure the code nerds love these toys, because they can cut down on their typing time, but they don’t do dick for the poor soul who just wants to “put a picture box in that damn corner and link it to the Disneyworld site.”
I “get” how modern web pages work. You make up text files full of content and links to content, and then you link them to a master style sheet that governs the look of the site (colors, fonts, point sizes, etc.). This is a stupifyingly simple concept that should easily translate into a stupifyingly simple editor. But the code nerds don’t want that. They want infinite options to twiddle with their style sheets using multiple programs in ways I couldn’t care less about. And what the code nerds want, the rest of us have to put up with.
