A View Source Web ⇥ viewsource.info

Garry Ing, writing for the third issue of the HTML Review:

On my personal websites view source meant being able to adapt and remix ideas. Like drawing a map, elements and pages acted as landmarks in the browser to be navigated between. As a self-initiated learner, being able to view source brought to mind the experience of a slow walk through someone else’s map.

This ability to “observe” software makes HTML special to work with. In particular, it’s sense of “transparency” as Clay Shirky wrote in April, 1998, numerating on what makes for “good” software: […]

This is a lovely article, with meaningful presentation; I encourage you to view it on a device which supports hover better than your smartphone browser likely does.

This world is unfortunately becoming lost or, at least, degraded — not because it is no longer possible to view the source of a webpage, but because that source is often inscrutable, even on simple webpages. There are still the familiar building blocks of paragraph tags, blockquotes, and all-purpose divs, but markup is oftentimes dense and littered with utility CSS classes. I am not dumping on new ways of doing things just because they are unclear to me; I am dumping on them because they are unclear for everyone. Markup is structure visible to all.