Week 8: Experiment

In the beginning of the blog question for this week, Prof. Galey discussed an experiment he did: he copied an excerpt of text from Word, pasted it into a blogging site, and viewed it in HTML. The result Prof. Galey viewed was a horrendous and unpleasant looking code. This intrigued me to try this activity on my own. Based on Prof. Galey's result, my hypothesis was that I would end up with a complicated code (I believe the words "torturous" and "horror" were used haha).

I copied the following excerpt from my personal academic notes from a Word doc:




Since WordPress is my blogging site of choice, I first pasted the text into WordPress and viewed it in HTML. As mentioned, I expected something complicated to be the result, however I was surprised with the result:



Since I did not receive the result I expected, I tried the same experiment but used a different blogging platform (specifically the Blogger site used for the purpose of this blog). This time I got the results I expected. The following is an excerpt of the code that resulted as the complete code is very lengthy:




This experiment has shown me that all content looks fluid on the surface as visually my notes pasted seamlessly into both WordPress and Blogger. However, dependent on the blogging site the underlying code may be "bloated" and complex looking. It also makes me wonder why the code is elegant looking in WordPress but not in Blogger. From my personal experience, I know that WordPress is widely used, so maybe the glitches in the code have been removed due to its wide user base? Regardless, this experiment shows that there is definitely tension between the content and container - maybe not on the surface, but deep down within the code.