Substance, Form, and Structure
As I’ve been creating this weblog over the past few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between the “content” of this site; the layout; and the code that generates it. The “romantic author” myth relies on an instant “creative spark” in which some new idea is born, presumably something that (in Internet postmodernist vernacular) lies in the domain of “content”. Yet, at least subjectively, I feel just as creative when I’m working on the code that presents this content to the world (and specifically to you, my perhaps imaginary audience). Or when I’m working on the “stylesheet” of this site, where most of the decisions are made about color, font, and the like.
Until recently, the new and the unique were not all that highly valued. Dozens of roles were involved in creating a book (or scroll, &c.), and historically the role of the “author” was not necessarily the lynchpin. Who truly creates anything new anyway?
There’s also an interesting interplay between these various parts. The weblog code makes a number of decisions about how content is presented, linked together, organized; the content itself contains metadata that create some internal structure that is apart from “the ideas” themselves; and the stylesheet is reflected in both the coding and the content.