Posting #1

I found the readings for this section interesting, especially the article on website plagiarism. I was actually quite surprised by that particular article. I agree that the wholesale copying of the content of someone else’s site is wrong, and by this I mean all of the visible elements and content of a website – the text, the images, the links. The matter of the actual code used to create a site, that’s a lot trickier for me. I see HTML, XHTML, and CSS as building blocks, like bricks or concrete blocks or even Legos. For some things there are only a limited number of ways you can write the code in order to achieve the results you want. Since this is the case, two people can sit down and write very similar code. When you come across a website that does something interesting, and you work with HTML, I think it’s only natural to look at the source code and perhaps play with it a bit to see how it all works. By exploring other people’s code you learn things you might not otherwise learn and that leads to innovation. Up until now I knew just enough about HTML to be able to look at the source code on broken pages to find links, but I haven’t really known enough about HTML to be able to look at the page source and really understand what I’m looking at. I think encrypting your HTML would be a very bad idea. Without the sharing of code I don’t the think the internet would be the place it is today.