Reading 1: A Handmade Web

1. The argument of this paper is that web pages should be handmade by their creators and contain creativity and art that is uniquely theirs. Web pages should not be over-commercialized by corporations, focusing on utility rather than aesthetics, and focusing on surface functionality without caring about the principles behind it. Many of today's web pages are made very minimalist, with little design or elements, just textual content. These web pages represent the information development nowadays: focusing on content at the expense of design. Web pages should be a "manual", a unique document to be used on a computer, not just a set of codes. The web page for this article, for example, has very interesting illustrations and excellent paragraph assignments. Every detail in this web page shows its uniqueness and makes me feel different from most web pages and easily remember that web pages should be contemporary works of art, just like historical works of art.

2. Carpenter uses the handmade web to resist the over-commercialization and functionalization of the web in an age of fragmented information reception. Handheld devices prevent people from understanding how the web is made, which leads to a focus on what the web presents rather than what is behind it. The web page for this article is a good example of Carpenter's resistance to handheld devices: I tried to open the article "The Handmade Web" on my iPad and got some garbled code. Search engines have made the web part of commerce, and when a web page can be searched at will, it loses its ability to attract the specific people who are interested in it. The article's web page that self-destructs when indexed by a search engine, for example, represents Carpenter's insistence on personal web pages rather than commercial web pages produced by a company or program. The handmade web resists the contemporary tendency for information to conform to trends and erase the uniqueness of the web.

3. Nowadays, when I open a web page on my mobile phone, most web pages load very quickly. This is a result of the continuous development and advancement of web pages and electronic devices. But when a web page loads slowly or certain elements don't display, my first reaction is to complain that the page isn't practical enough (like it won't run on a mobile phone) or that the network speed is too slow. But the reality is that the web page is old or complex in design, and more importantly, the web page is designed to be displayed on a computer. With today's electronic devices, I have ignored the production process of web pages and the content behind the web pages, and only focus on how the web pages look to me. Web pages on computers and web pages on handheld devices are already two development directions. Handheld devices are designed to allow people to browse quickly, so people don't care if the web page is designed to display incompletely. Handheld devices have brought people into the era of fragmented information, ignoring the birth and existence of the Internet, and only treating the web page as a text recorder.