Assignment 1: <a>

Design and program 10 intricately hyperlinked web pages which describe a journey across campus.

<a> is for “anchor,” the fundamental HTML tag which marks a specific place on a specific web page. Expanded with href as in <a href="this-web-page.html"> the <a> tag marks a hyperlink to another place on the web. This could be another page on the same website, or could as easily be another page on a server halfway around the world. Clicking from hyperlink to hyperlink might send you (virtually) racing around the globe from a small server in Venice to a government website in Singapore to a shared community in Melbourne. We easily forget that it can be exhilarating to lose yourself online, to surf, to travel from site to site, to even forget where you came from. There is a good reason that in 1994 when the web was brand-new, Microsoft launched Windows95 and its web browser with an ad campaign that memorably asked Where do you want to go today?

So, where do *you* want to go today?

Week 1: Start where you wake up. Walk to our classroom in 185 Nassau Street. Stop along the way. Stop where you like to stop. Stop where you have always been meaning to stop. Stop somewhere extra simply because. Route yourself way out of the way, perhaps. But eventually end up in 185 Nassau. Now, record your walk as a series of instructions as at least 10 text-only (no images! no graphics! one size of text only! no special fonts!) so that someone else can repeat your journey. Include hyperlinks from one page (stop) to another to another back to another etc. You will be articulating any number of possible paths from A to B. 

Week 2: Based on feedback, adjust your collection of hyperlinked webpages to make a coherent (if divergent) whole. Then hand draw using only a pencil and an 8.5-inch piece of paper a site map for your 10 webpages which shows how each links to the other.

This is a prescribed assignment. The goal is to learn some very basic HTML, to think about how your communicate with limited graphic means, and to appreciate and realize the proper magic of a good hyperlink.