A bit about code

This evening I spent an hour subbing one piece of copy for The Linc‘s website. Not because it was spectacularly bad, but because the HTML formatting was just horrendous.

The solution basically involved me having to go through and strip all the existing HTML code from the article and replace it with stuff that actually made sense. (I think the copy was pasted into the visual editor from a word processor, and was just bizarre and horrible.)

This was an exceptional case, but it made me think about how much code student journalists need to know.

The more I think about it, the more it seems that the main suggestion I was making for how the Lincoln School of Journalism should improve its online teaching — adopting WordPress in all production modules — conflicts with my assertion that students don’t need to know HTML.

On the whole WordPress is very easy to use, but when it comes to actually posting things the visual editor can produce some really horrible code. If things go wrong, or significant formatting changes need to be made, then looking at the HTML is usually the best way of sorting things out.

In a comment, Martin Stabe wrote:

Most – nearly all – journalists will never have to do HTML markup, let alone template design, during their entire working lives.¹

Why is this? I don’t know for certain, but I’d guess that there’s more separation between copy and the resulting code in “professional” CMSes. So, yes, fine, the journalists who get to use those systems will not have to tinker with the code. And if things do go wrong and require some kind of intervention either directly in the code, or with what produces the code, it’ll be handled by people who know what they’re doing.

But what about the people who aren’t part of an organisation that has this setup? An organisation without in-house technical staff? An organisation that consists of just one, or two journalists?

If the “next big thing” for journalism is really the next small thing — hyperlocal, small publishers, and “entrepreneurial journalists” — then the people doing this kind of work are going to need to know some code.

They’ll be running their own sites. Thankfully it can be done fairly easily. As an example, The Linc does pretty much all its technical stuff in-house.² The knowledge and skills needed aren’t particularly advanced, and they’re fairly easy to pick up.

I think what I wrote about teaching students HTML was a reaction to how it is currently taught at Lincoln. Teaching it as the lead-in to using Dreamweaver is wrong. Students, and journalists in general, don’t need that kind of HTML.

What they do need, particularly if we want to equip students to do innovative things on the internet, is a knowledge of how HTML works in the context of a CMS. They don’t need to know how to write a static page in HTML, and nor should they be taught it.

But they should know how the formatting for the post they’re working on in WordPress works, and how to change things, and know how lists work, and links, and pictures.

If you’re a taxi driver you probably don’t need to know how to build a car, or conduct extensive engine repairs. But you should probably know how to change the oil, inflate the tyres, and fill the wiper fluid. You should also know how they affect things when you’re behind the wheel.

I wasn’t taught HTML or CSS in any great detail, but I know the basics of how to edit the template files on this site to get things to work how I want them to work. I had to play around and learn for myself, and I now consider them essential skills for publishing my own website.³

If there’s a good chance self-publishing is going to be significant for the future of journalism, then we should teach the people who are going to do it the skills they need to do it.