Lab Week 2

Should All Students Learn Web Language?

I believe all students should definitely learn the fundamentals of web language and know some history of the internet and how it came to be. That context is incredibly important in this day and age where having a presence online is basically necessary for any business. Knowing the basics like how to build a website skeleton in HTML, how to make it appear aesthetically with CSS, and how to make it interactive and dynamic with JavaScript will serve students very well once they get into the workplace or even when competing to enter the workplace.

My Coding Experience

My experience with coding and web language is from my statistics background. I have used R Studio for most of my coding experience and a little bit of Python. R Studio sort of does the HTML and CSS work for you so I don’t have a lot of experience with either. I at least know what the purpose of each language is. That is why understanding them is important though because it allows you to customize the output for your R documents even more. For my Comps project this term, my group and I are creating a Shiny App in R to convey information about College Football rankings. This Shiny App example code uses R to generate and update content, HTML to structure the interface, and CSS to control layout and appearance in the browser. The UI is the user interface and the server tells the app how to respond to user input. We will be able to input our interactive tables and graphs as well as our write up analysis in separated tabs within a website.

library(shiny)

ui <- fluidPage(
  
  tags$h1("Simple Shiny App"),
  
  sidebarLayout(
    sidebarPanel(
      sliderInput(
        inputId = "n",
        label = "Number of observations:",
        min = 10,
        max = 100,
        value = 50
      )
    ),
    
    mainPanel(
      plotOutput("scatterPlot")
    )
  )
)

server <- function(input, output) {
  
  output$scatterPlot <- renderPlot({
    x <- rnorm(input$n)
    y <- rnorm(input$n)
    plot(x, y, main = "Random Scatterplot")
  })
}

shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)

“The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the less we enjoy a single, universal information space.”

Julian Lucas, “Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It,” Annals of Technology, The New Yorker, September 29, 2025. 

This quote was interesting to me because it talks about how the original open internet websites are becoming less and less used in todays social media, account based society. The writer talked about how separating information behind closed platforms makes it less widely accessible and raises ethical questions.