Week 3/4 — HTML is the father, CSS is the son
While I showed Abdi the complex and weird things computers do, Abdi showed me how simple things can be. When I was helping him writing his first html website this week, I struggled to explain how HTML and CSS work together. It has been so long ago since I started writing code and it has become my first language maybe even surpass Mandarin or English. My thinking works in the logic of coding. It’s like native speakers find it hard to explain the grammar of a language, I couldn’t come up with a better explanation than it just works like that. I would say something like you have to reference your CSS file in your HTML file, otherwise it won’t know what style to use for each element, which makes no sense to Abdi. For a few hours we were like a chicken talking to a duck(雞同鴨講), Abdi couldn’t understand what I was talking about and I couldn’t understand what he couldn’t understand. We kept trying and trying and then one point, Abdi said ohh I got it now HTML is the father, CSS is the son! It took me a second to think through that relationship and then it started to make sense.
That was such a simple metaphor and I couldn’t think of that because complicated relationships/logics in the digital space is much more natural to me than those in the physical world. I realise there is always a tradeoff, when you understand something, you are at the same time losing the ability to understand something else. It’s not only in learning coding but in everything in our daily life.
I remembered when I went into our office at work for the first time, I went to the office manager and they told me I have to accept an invite on my email before they can set me up in the office. I found it amusing that I was a real person standing in front of them and yet I have to go through my email to do it. And then when I asked for access to the bike storage in the building. They asked me fill out a form and go to another person. When I went talking to the other person, they told I can’t help you, I haven’t got the email yet. Again I found it funny how far the process has gone ahead of real human interactions. It was such a big walk-around to do a simple thing. And the people within the process probably weren’t even aware of how complicated this is, it has become the nature of them. And when they told me I had to go through this system and then that process, I immediately understood it and I knew exactly why it has to be so complicated because I am behind one of those softwares that facilitates those processes.
I’m trained to fit in this complicated world and to build on top of its complexity. I wonder what I have lost and yet I have no idea about.
