I am examining potential analogies for explaining technology of various sorts to laypersons in the hopes they will grasp the relationships of the world they use every day. Today’s analogy is how building a web page is like building a house.
One of the historical patterns we see is where a specific field or part of life moves from being expert to common. That’s been true with reading over time, for example. It’s been true with automobiles in some countries. There was a time when only women had babies….okay, you got me there.
But over time there’s an expectation in the computer industry that average people will learn technology to a greater degree, even if not to the same depth as a computer scientist or computer engineer.
I am examining potential analogies for explaining technology of various sorts to laypersons in the hopes they will grasp the relationships of the world they use every day. I’ve already given part of the explanation of why, but here’s the other part:
Until you see the cracks in the walls with the sunlight slicing the darkness, and until you see the bubbles rising to the edge of the universe and ask what if it isn’t the edge at all, you have very little reason to jump out of the water or break into the day.
With that I hope to, from time to time, examine potential analogies for bits of technology.
The Web
The metaphor for the web is moving to a house you are building. In this, HTML is a set of special boxes. You have some like title that are meant for very particular contents. You don’t put your china in a box with your hammers.
You have other boxes like html itself, which are there to hold everything you put in them. You put your china in one box, and your hammers in another, but both of those boxes can fit in a third, bigger box. That bigger box is actually the truck, in this case, but you might have palettes that hold many smaller boxes, as with something like div.
Then you have CSS, which are tags you attach to the boxes to tell the movers where they go. “This is a very dark brown room.” Or, “all of the windows should be blue, but after you have looked through one, it is purple.”
If you’ve seen that last bit, it’s the style applied to links using the default styles of most web browsers.
That’s right. There are default styles that come with the browser. They are there so that if you don’t specify, there’s a good base to work from.
Now, additional styles let you override those defaults, but there are also some amount of styling implied in the way you pack your boxes.
If you put some text in one box, then it will end up together in the house unless the styles applied are very explicit.
You also have peculiar boxes like script, which tell the builders that they contains fixtures or robots that will respond to visitors to the house in some way. They might be faucets that will, when turned on, create or delete whole rooms. They might be spy cameras to watch the visitors and tell the owners of the house what they did in the house.
Extending the metaphor out, the creator of the document packs everything up in their boxes with their blueprints and send them up to a server. Then you visit the server and it spits out the boxes with the blueprints, which your builder, the browser, assembles.
Some of the documents aren’t made in that way. Increasingly, the houses of the web are made in factories called applications. Think about some service like Google Search. They have thousands of computers working to find the content all over the internet, and when you search those computers shove that content into the right boxes with the blueprints and styles and deliver them to you.
Anyway, I guess that’s enough about the web for today. Did this analogy make it clear how the web works?