CSS and the quest for meaning

So I signed up for Web Art this session thinking it would be about art, right? Well, grasshopper, you would be wrong. It's about web production. So far, all we've done is CSS. For those of you who do not know what CSS is, let me break it down for you. In a nutshell, Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, is the standard for the coding and transmisssion of web pages. In the early days of the web, webpages were displayed on your computer screen via HTML code that downloaded to your computer every time an individual web page was requested by you. Every page, lots of code, lots of overhead for your computer, yadda, yadda, yadda. Okay, fast forward. Now we have CSS which allows a website to have one page of code that determines the styling so that it only has to download once. If you don't understand, that's okay, because it doesn't really matter. The point is that this class is not an art class. It's not even about design. It's about making the computer gods happy. Yesterday in class I was thinking to myself: CSS is what happens when the cafeteria industry takes over the culinary arts.