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PHP is a popular scripting language used by hundreds of custom Web applications, widely used software such asWordPress and MediaWiki, and popularWeb sites such as Facebook and Digg. Though it was originally designed for personal home page production (hence the acronym), PHP is most often used in server-side scripting. A core part of the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), it is probably the language most often used for database-drivenWeb applications, thanks to its easy support for MySQL. PHP code is also popular because it can be mixed freely with HTML, via simple opening and closing tags. Even novice users can cut and paste code into Web pages and perform complex database operations—or create security and privacy problems: PHP is involved in a huge percentage of the vulnerabilities tracked by the National Institute for Standards and Technology. 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 an English student, or a psychology intern) is working on her tags, trying to figure out what is happening on the page. We work together, heads not quite touching, poring over the symbols on the screen, looking for (and finding) the code that will enable the page to display. She utters a small sound, makes a change, and previews the page. And the curtain falls, the page appears—but with a difference. For now, we understand the trick. In new media studies, we have (or should have) gone beyond simply • 1 6 7 “Invisible” Code and the Mystique of Web Writing Helen J. Burgess 11 pointing to a Web page and commenting on its structure, development, and language. But the current trend in focusing on “visual literacy” tends to emphasize what’s on the screen, rather than what lies beneath. Our understanding of code has gotten lost under the layers of GUI and WYSIWYG ; graphic design teachers (trained primarily in the visual register) pale when students click on the button in Dreamweaver, and the mysteries of markup appear. At the same time, though, teaching plain vanilla markup is somewhat old-fashioned. Sure, there is the magic moment of revelation, but in an age of database-driven pages and invisible scripting languages (PHP, Perl, ASP.NET, the usual laundry list of server-side applications), it seems rather quaint to be teaching the tag (or even worse, the deprecated and tags). Server-side scripting languages complicate markup by writing code for us; if we try to view the source, all we see are the traces left behind in the shape of inert HTML tags. The magic happens elsewhere. Markup, then, has come full circle: from the mystery of the Web page, to the revelatory moment of “View Source,” to the invisible scripting we know is there but can’t quite get to. Unable to scan the page and take an educated guess at what’s going on under the hood, students face a key disadvantage as they try to understand how theWeb works. This is especially true in the world of the social Web, which is dependent on database calls and the run-time restructuring of pages for its vitality. “View Source” is no longer sufficient as a mechanistic view of the way information appears on the screen. In this essay I want to talk about the history of invisible code and its relationship to the mystique of writing. N. Katherine Hayles notes that code has a tendency to operate through “practices of concealing and revealing ” (54), in which the programmer chooses which code to leave visible for the purposes of authoring and debugging. But the process of revelation and concealment in markup goes much further back than electronic texts—in fact, it is an essential part of the hidden history of print and writing itself. Long before the magical moment of “View Source,” print and book producers were already using their own forms of hidden markup: the symbols written on texts that contained instructions or marked points for...

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