For my fourth School of Webcraft challenge, I looked for HTML-like things in a walk around the block. I came up with the idea for this video quickly, because I felt it conveyed what my thought patterns were like post-HTML-lesson, suddenly seeing things in terms of tags. My bi-weekly dessert quest, transformed!
It’s been a while since I’ve worked with video editing software at all, so I probably spent more time fiddling with that than I did learning the basic HTML tags. This is also the first thing I’ve shot in stop motion, which was easier to do than I expected, but also harder to do well, particularly on a public street where you don’t want to be the creep with a camera. Where’s my Google Glass already?
Under the cut are my explanations for my choice of tags/object pairs and some credits from the video.
<div> – a generic container: the cake cases. My first idea was just a big clear tote.
<span> – similar to <div>, but inline: bike rack (get it, because the bikes are in (a) line?
<menu> – the menu at the restaurant. Also the rack of tea boxes,
<nav> – table of content, Also, as I saw on a later part of my walk, way finding signs.
<time> – clock, but also all the open/close times listed on storefronts and the times and date that accompanied street parking rules.
I took the text-based tags — <p>, <q>, <blockquote>, <ol>, <ul>, <li> — pretty literally in my video. After years of editing school newspapers and writing academically, those types of tags made pretty immediate sense to me. Some of my classmates were much more metaphorical, which is really cool. I was surprised at how hard it was to find an ordered list in the wild. I tried to capture the jukebox labels, but they were actually “A1” style, and since that’s not a type actually supported by the <ol> tag, it didn’t seem fair.
Credits:
Video Location: Rick’s Dessert Diner in Sacramento, CA
Video made with: Lapse It and iMovie
Soundtrack: Ice Cream by New Young Pony Club
Veronica Beaty 
never seen a video post for HTML hunting. very creative post!