Mdst3703 2013-09-05-studio2

Studio 2: HTML
Prof. Alvarado
MDST 3703
5 September 2013

Business
• Blogging – after class, and before the
weekend, write a reflective post about the
week
– Does everyone know what a post is?
• Don’t let this sit . . . Do it before you begin
next week’s readings

McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

Plato
• Plato’s cave is an allegory of knowledge
– Describes on the role of media and imitation in the
formation of knowledge
• Plato posits a hierarchy of imitation and media
forms
– The Forms  “First order things”  Artistic
representations of things
• Plato devalues art and poetry for being at the
bottom of this hierarchy
– He values geometry and philosophy as having access
to the Forms

Plato
• As an allegory of media, the following identities
seem to hold
– Shadows = art and poetry
– Puppeteers = artists and poets
– Puppets = ? (part of the shadows’ apparatus)
• In contemporary terms, the shadows can be
identified with mass media
– TV, radio, film, social media, etc.

The allegory of the cave
lives on in Marxist critiques
of society. Reality is
production, and the
shadows are ideology and
religion.
But the philosopher Karl
Popper blames
totalitarianism on Plato’s
cave.
1967

Aristotle
• In the Poetics, Aristotle takes a less dim view
of art and poetry
– We learn through imitation; imitation is
fundamental to being human
– Different art forms convey different kinds of
meaning
• Tragedy (a form of drama) represents a
particular kind of human action

Note the preservation of the abstract over the visual
Aristotle’s reformulates Plato’s distinction

Where do digital media developers
fit into the allegory of the cave?
What kinds of imitation do we
produce?

Shadows = art and poetry = INTERFACE
Puppeteers = artists and poets = CODER
Puppets = = CODE

Exercise 1: Enhance JEdit
• To get your File System Browser on the side of
your editor:
– Utilities > File System Browser > Dock at Left
• To add plugins:
– Plugins > Plugin Manager > Install
– Choose SideKick and XML
– May have to pick a different serve by clicking on
“Download Options…” at the bottom
• To turn word wrapping on or off:
– Utilities > Buffer Options > Word Wrap

Exercise 2: Create a directory for
today’s work
• You can create directories in JEdit by clicking on a
folder in the top file browser window and
selecting “New Folder” from the context menu
• In your home directory, create the following
directories under “public_html”
– MDST3703
– MDST303/09-05
• In the directory for today, create a page
– poetics.html

Exercise 3: Create an empty HTML Page
<html>
<head>
<title>The Poetics</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

XML
• Stands for “eXtensible Markup Language”
– The language in which XHMTL is written
• Basic rules
– Elements are signified by tags: start tags, end tags,
and singleton tags
– Tags are signified by angle brackets
– Attributes are signified by key/value pairs in the
start tag
<elementname key=“value”> …
</elementname>

Basic HTML Elements
HTML
HEAD
TITLE
BODY
H1, H2, H3 …
P
IMG
UL/OL
LI
TABLE
TR
TD
See http://www.w3schools.com/html
NOTE: By convention, I use capitals to name elements, even though
tag names are always lower case

Exercise 4: Create a chapter of the
Poetics
• Go to the resource listed on today’s blog page
• View the source of the page and cut the text
corresponding to your chapter
– Each person grab the chapter associated with your
number (which will be given to you)
• Paste the text into the file you just created
(poetics.html)

Exercise 5: Add some style
• Create a STYLE element inside the HEAD element,
after the TITLE element
• Add the attribute type=“text/css”
• Inside of the element, put the following:
p {
font-family: Serif;
font-size: 14pt;
width: 6in;
}

CSS
• Cascading Style Sheets
• Allows you to control fonts, colors, sizes,
layout, etc.
• Format:
selector {
key: value;
key: value;
}

Mdst3703 2013-09-05-studio2

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