Why writing HTML sucks

It's nice to know that the people closest to you are the ones most capable of completely embarassing you. I'm not talking about things like bad breath, which is now simply bothersome since Madison Avenue has pummelled near-instinctive impulses into our limited psyches. Power-popping sugar-and-retsyn tablets is as natural as scooping into the coin return after hanging up or checking your keys after you've closed a locked car door. In our society, a little oral odor isn't embarassing, it just means you've been at the fridge during commerical breaks. Bad consumer! Bad consumer!

And I don't mean silly habits, like snoring or singing Cars songs in the shower. Loved ones will spring these little tidbits on near-strangers with a casual familiarity normally reserved for psychotherapy, but it's easy to brush aside such sociopathic discrepencies.

No, I'm talking about having it revealed that you write a Web page. Man, if there was ever a single piece of information to not be discussed at social events, it's this little item of personal trivia. While everyone else is wearing "Hi, I'm _____" stickers, the newly-exposed Web publisher is stuck wearing a dead albatross with the word "geek" spraypainted across it's rotting breast as their introductory badge.

I t just so happened that I was recently invited to the wedding of some college friends, people I hadn't seen in a few years. The event went smoothly, and just after the cermony I ran into another college housemate.

You know how it goes. This person, someone with whom I once shared a rather intimate moment of alcohol-induced buddy-system puking, I could now not gather enough words to complete a 1040-EZ. Worthwhile conversation escaped me. An interesting private life would have helped. I threw out the predictable chit-chat: "So ... what are you up to?". A classically easy question that gets the burden of producing conversation off of you and on the other person. Problem is, after their twenty-second summary, they tend to throw the question right back at you, a verbalized hot potato.

So, I struggled to answer my own question. I'm pretty much living the standard Silicon Valley experience ... sixty minutes a day in traffic, too much time at work, too much time spent with eyeballs fastened to a monitor. Oh yeah, I sleep and eat between coding frenzies and staff meetings.

And then, my significant other jumps in: "tell him about your Web site!" Oh, Judas Priest, don't bring that up. I project my trademarked Look of Death, which is completely obvious to my friend and his date, but escapes the attention of its intended target. I get goaded again: "Jim wrote a page about Fry's Electronics. All sorts of people read it."

When people hear you're actively running a Web page, they don't think "cool!", they think "introvert!"

Great. I direct my voice squarely at my toes and explain about the page, and Fry's, and how I still spend gobs of cash there when I'm not attending the aforementioned meetings or suffering through VGA drenchfests. There's a technical question-and-answer session. I explain how my Web pages are kept on an ISP's server and not my own PC and why I don't have my own domain name -- some other asshole beat me to the punch. With the wrap-up complete, I shift topic gears and ask my friend how his parents are -- and sure enough, after his synopsis the question is ping-ponged back in my direction.

F or some reason, Ad Nauseam is not something I'm extremely proud of, at least for citizens of that netherworld called "reality". Maybe if I just kept a standard home page with .WAV files of my bad singing and digitized JPEGs of my 4x4 it wouldn't be so bad. It also wouldn't be quite the lightening bolt of conversation, either. (Or maybe it would, if I'm hanging with a low-tech crowd. But probably not.) Sometimes I think producing this rather odd HTMLized journal-magazine-diary isn't much better than the standard templatized home page, replete with a guestbook and numerous mailto:'s begging for comments. But Ad Nauseam gets a few more emails.

For all the ink spilled and breath wasted hyping the Web, there is one stereotype firmly holding position in our society's cultural airspace: the Web is owned and operated by nerds. People don't gaze in admiration when they find out I spend my spare time typing up little diatribes or trying to get the TABLE tag to work right. They reserve their awe for people who jump off of bridges wearing elastic ankle bracelets or dive out of airplanes with silk backpacks. There's nothing death-defying about HTML and there's nothing sexy about being listed in Yahoo. It's boring and strange -- when people hear you're actively running a Web page, they don't think "cool!", they think "introvert!"

O ne man's hobby is another man's neurological phenotype. Admitting you write for the Web is akin to wearing plaid floods at the high school homecoming. You might as well don the dead albatross necklace, flies and all, and hope you get one good dance in. But it won't be with a cheerleader.

The HTML Writer's Guild tries to put a nice face on it -- "this isn't geekery, this is a craft, finely honed and carefully studied." Pretensions aside, spin doctoring the ridiculously simple task of writing HTML is only, well, getting rid of those loud slacks and putting on a pair of Levis. There's still that damn bird decomposing around your neck, and you're sitting out the slow dances.

Wired wants the Web to be cool. Radio announcers want the Web to be cool. Heck, I'd like for the Web to be cool. Someday, perhaps, history will write about an early batch of authors who mucked with primitive protocols in an attempt to build a better information system. Maybe, just maybe, all of this remembered as bold and daring and exciting.

Or maybe the HTML Writer's Guild got the analogy right the first time -- we'll all be compared to the alchemists of yore, everyone frantically trying to transmute lead into gold.