From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup (review)
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The editors of this collection, which grew out of a panel at the 2003 Conference on College Composition and Communication, make the claim: “In the age of new media . . . the literate mind has extended to the markup mind” (p. xiv). Chapters seek to explore how web design is (re)shaping human cognition and identities. Using an organization focusing on HTML keywords, authors use code terms to launch discussions of the significance of new media for changing communication practices.
Many of the highlighted markup terms were chosen for their historical significance, representing a phase of HTML development. Colleen A. Reilly follows the development of the alt attribute, originally used as a “marker of the marginal” (p. 33), though more recently used to format ADA-compliant websites. This historical linkage affords Reilly the opportunity to discuss notions of disability-as-other, arguing that ADA compliance may not be a wholly adequate approach to designing sites that are usable for people with a wide range of abilities. Also in a historical vein, Michelle Glaros focuses on <frame> as a tag that helped early web designers control formatting, while also enforcing constraints and ideologies of order from older, print media. Both chapters question how these HTML terms represented existing social orders, and how web designers maintained this order using HTML.
Throughout the chapters, authors refer to the influence that early web development by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN continues to have on current HTML-design practices. Jeff Rice takes on the foundational <A> tag, which initiates connections between texts and images, in order to [End Page 250] interrogate machine communication’s reliance on separating information before connecting it. Rice leads this discussion to a question of ontological beliefs about relationships among people: Are we always in a relationship or are we always individual? Rice argues that early web developers built a system that relies on a belief in connectedness. He contrasts this with a traditional educational system that approaches writing instruction as if it addresses disconnected individuals, thus identifying a code-related basis for rethinking how teachers’ notions of individuality might be at odds with contemporary students’ Web 2.0 networked practices and informal learning styles.
A number of authors look to Marshall McLuhan’s media concepts to explain historical antecedents for current web-design practices and the ideologies they carry with them. Brendan Riley focuses on the <style> tag to argue that early web developers reinstated a form–content dichotomy privileging information over design. Citing McLuhan’s notion that typography supports a separation of thought and feeling, Riley finds that World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) design standards uphold “philosophies of enlightened rationalism and print literacy,” even though new media texts are “moving away from linear, language-centered forms toward spatial, visual forms” (pp. 70–71). In this new media environment, documents offer a wealth of extra-textual, sensory information that encourages people to read them in more holistic ways than is possible with linear print texts. Thus the separation of form and content breaks down as people learn to derive significant information from both a text and its extra-textual elements. Rudy McDaniel and Sae Lynne Schatz further discuss how the <img> element helps people understand texts via online imagery. Through an analysis of human cognition, they argue that online imagery provides spatial information that people use in understanding story elements.
Addressing how <img> functions in a most personal way, Jennifer L. Bay takes on the <body> tag, asking how it codes our subjectivities. Exploring how a person might represent her or his body differently in sites such as Facebook, Match.com, or a personal blog, Bay argues that we can choose to <style> the <img> of our <body> online to suit the rhetorical situations we place ourselves in. She concludes that bodies are “media . . . always technological, always coded” (p. 163).
The editors of this collection assert that it addresses a gap in software studies concerning “the relationship between software and markup” (p. xvi...
