I hope that all of you will now see how simple and un-code-like HTML really is. Once you get the hang of it, it’s not hard, and you can do some pretty cool stuff with it.

One issue that has come up a lot in the labs is that for ALL of the assignments, you MUST use your own writing, and when we move to the CMS it must be written specifically for this module.

Because there have been so many questions about this, I’d just like to explain it clearly one more time.

Technology by itself, at least on the web, is meaningless. The whole point about learning this is not to make you into web designers, or to get you to have any sort of abstract interest in HTML, CSS, or anything else at the purely technological level. We’re going over things like HTML and CSS because we want you to start thinking about how these technologies can help you take your work and your ideas into places that they increasingly need to be, and further of course.

There will come a point, I hope, where you stop thinking simply about how, for instance, a hyperlink tag (<a href=”"> etc.) is correctly used in HTML, and start thinking about how it can help your articles do more and go further in terms of their ultimate purpose, which is to inform people as clearly and richly as possible. When you write the rest of the portfolio later in the year, you will be able to bring this knowledge and the understanding of these technologies straight into your methods.

When we say “Synergy between presentation, markup and content” on the , that is what we mean. When we mark the portfolios, this will be at the forefront of our minds. We will be looking for evidence that you have taken the abstract, meaningless technologies, and given them meaning in the context of your own journalistic work.