Ever since I started messing around with HTML, when I was twelve, I have found that it fulfills exactly the same needs as writing. They are both such good ways to waste time.

You can achieve something spectacular pretty quickly, but you can also tinker with something infinitely without ever being completely satisfied – and it expands to fill any amount of time. You’re never done with HTML, any more than you’re done revising a poem.

I wonder if it’s the same way for other programming languages. I don’t know, but I think what makes HTML seem like writing to me is the way that you sit there putting funny little symbols around everything, like a beehive, and then you step back, click a button, and it makes a visual picture. It’s a literal dramatization of the stages of writing – work work work RESULT – work work work RESULT. Something so laborious creating something so useful and cool.

I would like to write a poem that began with something like
A HREF=the first time we met
something like that,
using the HTML code as part of the language,
or something like the word “boyfriend” in close-tags at the end of it.
(WordPress won’t let me show what I mean by close-tags because,
like a good text editor,
it keeps absorbing them into the background of the post.)
Is HTML to web pages as meter is to poetry?
Invisible but essential? (Trying…)
I think this is one of those ideas that’s better in the idea
than in the execution.