Once again, I feel like I’ve overlooked articles that articulated significant questions about digital technologies, which I’ve been asking or discussed, that are still ongoing today. In particular, the question of whether to teach students to code HTML, use WYSIWYG, use templates, or some combination of the above, is no less controversial these days (and there are staunch proponents for each option). And as usual, some people still question whether such work should count as “writing” at all, or whether it falls under the domain of Composition, Computer Science, or someplace else. Personally, I think it counts as Composition and writing. But I’m also biased having been an undergrad TA for a web design course that I helped revise. Part of me would have liked to have read these articles 6 years ago, but part of me is also glad to have encountered questions of how to teach web design through experience.
Today, I also wonder how contested issues of teaching HTML or not in a Composition class are. I wonder this because I’ve tried to keep up with front-end web technologies since I was in high school, but I’ve fallen a little behind since HTML 5 and CSS 3 released and mobile devices changed the web. Given the proliferation of social media and the increasing complexity of web development, I wonder how much longer students outside of dedicated web design/UX design programs will feel a need or desire to learn HTML and front-end web technologies. Even with what I know of web design, for most things I would be likely to publish online, it’s faster these days to modify a WordPress site than to code one from scratch, or to just modify a template. Unless I really needed to develop a custom site for a very specific reason, it probably wouldn’t be worth the level of complexity and time it takes to put together a good web site. But, that knowledge of the underlying code comes in handy when things break, or need to be strategically broken. But I might just be getting old and bitter, and a little cynical about people who don’t believe in web writing as important to Composition and writing studies?