Roadkill on the information superhighway

Last week I had said that I hoped to start running cartoons above this column. Meanwhile I attended a web programming class at Iowa Western Community College. Sure you can draw a cartoon anywhere, but try finding a scanner when you want one.

Absent of scanner, I followed Teddy Roosevelt’s advice and did what I could with what I had, right where I was. In this case I had a digital camera and a laptop with Adobe PhotoShop.

Brad Swenson, our publisher would like to take everyone’s pictures around the PRESS office and start running little staff biographies each week in these newspapers. He even suggested running mine with my column- please, God, don’t let him decide to use this one.

It really illustrates how I felt this week- trapped inside of cyberspace.
Sure I guess I kind of know my way around a computer- enough to get by. Any summer-fill-in newspaper graphic designer and most high school yearbook advisors have to.

But this latest class I took at IWCC really made me feel like a pedestrian on the “information super highway.” Other teachers at school are always coming to me for help with whatever computer problems they have, but I can’t help them.
I use three programs and email. Sure I do a little blogging. But that’s like asking somebody who drives their truck to work on weekdays and does a little off roading on weekends how to realign a differential. Wha? Huh? Exactly. A casual computer program user or a graphic designer do not an information technologies (I.T.) expert make.

Allow me to explain some of what I’ve learned. This class was 8 AM- 5:30 PM all week. We were not allowed to use any programs to create web pages, we had to write them completely in XHTML code.

XHTML stands for “Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language.” Wha? Huh? Exactly.

First of all, calling the World Wide Web the “information superhighway” is an incredibly appropriate analogy. Back in the 1950’s Eisenhower did not insist on an interstate highway system for leisure and tourism travel, not even for interstate commerce by semi-trucks. This was the cold war, after all.
Ike wanted interstates for rapidly moving our nuclear missiles, quick mobilization of troops, and efficient evacuation of major cities in the event of WWIII.

Just like that, the Internet was developed in the 1960’s for electronic communication between military installations like the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) and all those missile silos peppered across the Dakotas.
Like so many trucks on the interstate, it’s now big business and commerce, along with scores of joy riders that clogs the arteries of the Wild Wild Web.
XHTML is just the latest computer programming language to be used to... uh, well, to lay down the gravel and rebar and concrete and asphalt to make that super highway travelable.

So after this last week, I went from being average Joe motorist compared to the NASCAR drivers of professional tech administrators (aka: “geeks”) to being on a road construction crew compared to the surveyors and civil engineers that are the code writing millionaires at Google and Pixar ( aka: “filthy rich geeks.”)
What was I writing? Stuff like this:

function calcLine1()
{
var rate = document.invoce.r1.value;
}

Wha? Huh? Exactly. And that was barely one piece. If it looks Greek to you, me too. Learning a program language really is like learning another language just like Greek or Spanish or German...or Martian or Venusian, exactly, I agree. But difficult as it is, it’s not impossible. Kind of like I can survive in a Mexican restaurant with my limited “Spanglish,” after this week I should be able to recognize enough of what real coder writers do to be able to use it in my school’s web pages and hopefully fix some problems, but I’m no Google guy.

If you remember enough of your English Grammar, I can give you some comparisons. In HTML, an “element” is like an “object” in JavaScript. A JavaScript object is like a noun in English.

A “method” in JavaScript is like a verb in English. In other words, a door swings, a noun verbs, an object methods, a “function calcLine” calculates on a spreadsheet.

“Properties” in JavaScript are like adjectives, they describe the nouns. It’s not just a function, it’s a rate calculating function. in JavaScript, a “value” is like a preposition...Which rate? “r1” the first rate.

I know, it still barely makes sense to me. The point is, it has to go in a certain order, a “syntax.” There’s logic to it.

So why did our professor prohibit us from using user-friendly web page designing programs instead of writing this all out? Why do Algebra teachers force student to write out their work, rather than just writing down an answer? No cheating and so we learned how to do it right. It also made us realize that we’re sort of like the volunteer candy stripers compared to all the brain surgeons out there.

If you'd like to see the website project I wrote visit http://ted.mallory.googlepages.com/default.htm