Basic Programming...

Yesterday I was talking to my roommate about computer stuff. He works for Adobe and does lots of programming things. A good portion of my colleagues in the Linguistics MA program at Brigham Young University also work with computer programming, as a big focus of modern linguistics involves computer language (to use a very simple term). This area is COMPLETELY foreign to me. I know how to type a document, check my email, and do a few other basic things, but other than that, I'm pretty crippled when it comes to the cyber universe. Even writing this blog has provided some unique challenges, which brings me back to my conversation with my roommate. I had experienced some difficulties with inserting images into one of my posts, and I mentioned it to my roommate. He went off on some detailed lecture about code that left me completely lost. He must have noticed my blank stare, because he took pity on me and started showing me some really basic stuff.  Here are a few things that I learned:

HTML is not short for "hotmail" as I had previously thought (I know, I know, you think I'd have figured that out before I finished a BA and turned 24, but I learned it yesterday).  It actually stands for Hyper Text Markup Language.  I still don't know exactly what all of that means, but I do understand that it is the computer language of most websites.  You can find it if you click the "Edit HTML" tab at the top of the page where you make a new blog post for example.  I still can't decipher most of it, it just looks like lots of abbreviations, parentheses, symbols, etc.  What I did learn is that it describes what all of the elements and functions of a webpage are, and if you can manipulate it by adding things, removing things, or writing new instructions, you can change how a page looks and how it functions.  I found this article that explained a few things, and wikipedia has quite a bit more.

I also learned that every little character and space in HTML is important, so if you write something incorrectly, it could alter the way the program functions.  Apparently there were some complications with the HTML of my blog, because I had been putting two spaces between sentences, the way I learned in elementary school.  This made my buddy laugh really hard when he figured it out.  He explained that this actually is not correct, and he showed me this article explaining why.  I thought it was funny.  This is probably another one of those things I should have learned before graduating from college.  Well, better late than never.

   

So these are a few new things I picked up yesterday.  I was purposefully vague about the actual mechanics of HTML, because I don't actually understand them yet.  If I misrepresented something here, just chalk it up to my ignorance.  I have decided that this is something I will continue to learn about, as the world is becoming more and more dependent on computers.  I welcome any advice and instruction in this area!