While my favorite website always has been, and always will be, Warner Brother’s promotional site for the hard-hitting documentary Space Jam there have been many changes to the features and design of websites since 1996. The underlying programming language is still basically the same though: HTML.
HyperText Markup Language is a programming language that tells your web browser, such as Safari, how to render the text and images that you see. This very newsletter uses HTML (unless you are one of our plain text readers, though I am guessing that there are fewer and fewer of you every day) that is generated via Textile, a simpler markup language that allows me to write this article more like a normal document. Most websites now also use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the look of the page, embedded scripts for interactive elements,
and embedded media files as well.
If you would like to take a look under the hood, Safari has an option to view the code that makes up any website. In order to enable this feature, you will need to go to Safari Preferences > Advanced and check the box that says “Show Develop menu in menu bar”. Now, you can open that menu and press “Show Web Inspector”. This will open a box on the bottom of the window that has all of the code that makes up the page. If you click on the target symbol next to the word Inspect, you can mouse around the page and see the specific code that makes up any one element of a page.
My favorite thing about this is the ability to remove an element of a website by deleting the code that generates it. I am a big crossword fan and generally do the Los Angeles Times crossword online. I find the animated ads on the side distracting, though, so the first thing I do every time is to inspect the code and remove the ads. I then put it into full screen and it is almost like doing it on paper.