A little story about my first encounter with page source ... One day, as I was helping Dan with Holly's site, I accidentally right clicked on my mouse and got this little menu. What could that be? I wondered. Maybe it was something I can use to help Dan. Besides, I was feeling adventurous that day. So I clicked it. (The menu on pcs looks a bit different, but it will say page or doc source, or something similar.) Imagine my surprise when my screen was filled with this! Umm, Dan, I posted somewhere in our conversations. There's code all over the place. This can't be good. What should we do?! Dan must have chuckled, because he replied quite calmly that everything was fine, and hadn't I ever heard of page source? Ummm, no. I'd never heard of page source. But it sure was interesting to look at! It was like seeing inside a programmer's head. Sometimes there were even comments in there. After that I couldn't get enough of checking out code for different websites. It was amazing to me that all this information was out there and I didn't even know it. So, try it: Right click, select page source, and see what you find. You probably won't recognize any of what you see, but that's okay. Pretty soon you start seeing little bits you understand here and there. Maybe some html, or a link, or a CSS class. All this stuff is what tells the browser how to display the web page. (More on that later.) The good news is that we don't have to program anything from scratch. Those tutorials you go through, where you learn to program 'Hello,World, in html are okay, but that's not what's going on here at programming school. One of my first web pages was set up with a template that Dan made, where I had to find some code and change it. Now off you go, into the worldwide web. Click some web pages. Check out the page source. Isn't it amazing that all the websites have their code out there for all the world to see? Wouldn't it be really easy to copy all that work and use it for your own page? Not quite, but that's for another lesson. Questions? Comments? Outbursts of delight--or dismay? Hop on board this thread with your thoughts on page source.
I always find it amusing when neophyte programmers want to obfuscate or obscure the source code for their webpage, as if the blink tags they have used are some giant secret.
One of the most exciting things for me was finding all this stuff out there--Open Source-- to learn from and build with. Here I'd been surfing the web happily for years without having much of an idea of how it worked, but finding all the parts right there to look at and understand was really great. I can't understand the impulse to hide something made from parts that it is likely other programmers have shared freely. And, what are 'blink tags'?
Blink tags, from way back in the very early days of the web, were an HTML tag (< blink >) that you would put around a word, phrase, or sentence to make it blink, so it would stand out. I don't think they are even recognized any longer by web browsers. They were used to horrible effect by novice web designers to make extremely gaudy pages, usually in conjunction with more animated gifs than should be allowed anywhere ever.
Oooooh! Just what I needed to make my Longview holiday lights sparkle! What? We don't want our visitors to think there is something wrong with their computers when they come upon our site? Okay, fine, maybe a soft glow using CSS animation or Javascript will do the trick.
