Dr Karl Stolley

I’ve gotten a lot of really kind feedback to a post I wrote for the TechRhet listserv. It was in response to a story Jim Kalmbach told of helping a student move beyond Dreamweaver to achieve something unique with her design. Jim mentioned me, saying

Now I know that out there somewhere Karl Stolley is smiling to himself thinking “If you only used notepad to begin with, she would have known the answer,” and in my head, I am responding equally as snippily saying “If I had used notepad, she would have dropped the class long before she could ask the question.”

So of course I had to respond to Jim. And here is my response:

I very much enjoyed your story, and thanks for thinking of me, Jim. I’d like to be a bit more hospitable and generous in my response than I was in your head, so let me give that a try:

(First off, I’d have dropped, too, if Notepad were the tech–Dreamweaver’s code view, or FOSS tools like Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/) for Windows or Text Wrangler (http://www.barebones.com/products/TextWrangler/) for Mac are better options, simply because they highlight the syntax of XHTML, CSS, and
so on–but also because Notepad chokes on utf-8. But that’s sort of beside the point.)

What I do think is that Bill Hart-Davidson’s work on objects & views vis-a-vis the Web is instructive here. As both writers and readers, we’ve been conditioned to work with a singular view of digital writing–Word has basically one view of a document (OK, and a print view, but it’s basically the same diff as “Normal”); the same can be said of Flash, Premiere, and a whole host of programs.

In other words, in most cases, the author’s composing environment and the reader’s viewing environment are essentially the same. In most cases.

What makes the Web unique, though, is that there are so many different views: different browsers on different operating systems, mobile devices, adaptive technologies–not the mention the ability of some sites, like Facebook and Delicious, to read and re-render particular views of sites through their various share/bookmark functions. Add in available system fonts, internet connection speeds, screen size, resolution, and the number of variations on a view of a Web page quickly spirals beyond any one program’s ability to represent even a fraction of the possible views.

Dreamweaver, particularly in its WYSIWYG mode, encourages authoring in a particular view, one that is basically (but not completely) like a full-on graphical desktop browser. One that is basically like Word or most other digital writing environments. Thus Dreamweaver’s popularity.

And of course, for a lot of people, Dreamweaver’s graphical view is more than adequate to put together a basic web page….just as the dizzying variety of brownie and cake mixes in your local supermarket is more than enough for most people to make baked goods to feed their families and friends.

But the cake mix, like Dreaweaver’s WYSIWYG, is just one view–a limited view–of the cake object. Add oil and an egg, mix, and bake in the oven, basically. Throw some frosting on, if you’d like.

It’s a cake, yes, but aside from knowing how/that one has to measure and add oil and egg, one’s cake literacy is limited by that view. Frosting adds a layer of customization to the cake, but frosting decorates as much as it obscures.

I’m going somewhere with this. I’ve recently been fascinated by a cookbook called Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking (Michael Ruhlman, Simon & Schuster, 2009). And his cookbook is unlike others that share shelf space at your local bookstore, in that it Ratio is not recipe-oriented, but ingredient- and process-oriented.

For example, rather than just tossing out a cake recipe, Ruhlman shows the ratios of different cakes’ ingredients, e.g.,

Pound Cake:
1 part butter : 1 part sugar : 1 part egg : 1 flour
Sponge Cake:
1 part egg : 1 part sugar : 1 part flour : 1 part butter
Angel Food:
3 parts egg white : 3 parts sugar : 1 part flour

Change up the types of eggs, the kinds of sugar, the type of fat or flour all you’d like. Add additional things to make chocolate, lemon, cinnamon cakes: the underlying ratios hold up. They guide.

What’s also interesting to note is how these ratios relate to one another: sponge and pound cake have the same ratios, but it is a matter of the order of mixing that results in pound rather than sponge; angel food eliminates egg yolks and fat, but has a much higher egg-sugar to flour ratio.

As an exercise, ask students sometime to describe the difference between a Word document, a PDF, and a web page. They often mention software, but are basically unable to express–rhetorically–why one might choose one format over another. (Which is why, I think, we see websites that are a pastiche of Word, PDF, and HTML files.) They are usually as incapable of describing these differences, in other words,
as most recipe-following bakers are at describing the difference between biscuit dough and pie-crust dough.

But what is more interesting and, I promise, to the point of this whole email is that, working from these ratios, a whole universe opens up in terms of baking and cooking, one that is not bound by the recipe (let alone the cake mix), but rather by the underlying *view* of cooking and baking as described by the ratios.

It’s a rhetorical form of cooking: contextualized to diet, personal preference, not to mention the ingredients one might have on hand in ways that recipes or boxed mixes are not.

But–and this is a significant ‘but’–we all have to start from somewhere. I cut my web-design teeth on WYSIWYGs, and it was only after their limitations in representing views of an object (particularly PHP- and MySQL- driven pages, e.g., what you’d confront working with WordPress templates) became too much to try and work around that I gradually, and with more mistakes than you can imagine,
moved into straight-up code-level development.

And that’s perhaps a way in to talk about your experience with your student last night: you *can* use Dreamweaver to make Web pages. Obviously. (Just as you can rely on a Pillsbury brownie mix to make brownies. Obviously.)

The question is not, a la the Code Wars we have on this list from time to time, whether Dreamweaver is better or worse than code, or capable or incapable of supporting the creation of web pages.

Instead, for me the question becomes, what are the literacies that are or aren’t being exposed, interrogated, and developed when one view is favored, or even exclusively used, over another? (Students in my classes write their source by hand, it’s true–but also with a browser or two handy to constantly verify the browser view as they work.)

Put another way, what are the rhetorical, versus the merely technical, benefits of these moments when it’s not a simple matter of Dreamweaver v. Code, but Realizing a Rhetorical Aim v. NOT Realizing a Rhetorical Aim?