A Room With a View

The mission: to produce a webpage.

The English professor advised us that one of our assignments would be to produce a webpage. That is if we were to become accomplished in the ways of computer communications. Ha! Surely I would be able to come up with some kind of a web page; after all, I was familiar with the computer and the webpage assignment appeared to be straightforward. But what exactly is a webpage?

A webpage is a kind of page that shows up on the screen of a computer. It is not a page that can be turned, torn, or inked. It is a computer-page; one can see this page on the computer. It sits on a floppy disk and is not visible to our human eyes, until we open the file up on the computer screen. But it is there just like the air we breathe, and more importantly, the computer can read this text. The webpage can contain images, as well as text, specifically hypertext mark-up language. Well, that is my version. There are books, and lots and lots of webpages instructing us in the ways of hypertext. However, as time is at a premium in the life of a student, who has time to read all the works on hypertext? Nonetheless, even though I cannot 'see' this web page, it must be done.

In our previous assignments we have had the opportunity to examine the work of other webpage designers. The webpage at www.htmlguru.com was obviously the work of a very talented designer. How was such a creative design produced?

By using a scanner and a program (Paintshop Pro) images can be produced. On my webpage you will see the image of a woman, a jug, and the beautiful play of light that Vermeer is famous for. Vermeer was a master at using light and when I chose this image it was because of the wonderful light.

This image was chosen for the humanness of the work and of course the light. As light as air, into the light, the light at the end of the tunnel--all of these clichés present one of our human ideals. We long for light and in Vermeer's works it is a constant. The layers of weight that can accumulate in a day are easily shed if one goes into the picture. The filtered sunlight gives us a sense of warmth and releases our thoughts to go where they may. The subject of the woman in Vermeer presented me with an interesting question. Is the woman the view or is she viewing? In her room with the window open, it is entirely possible that she did indeed view life on the street. In this case, she becomes the viewer. Naturally, as she is the subject of the work she is the viewed. But the idea of being both view and viewer intrigues me. In CMC, we are constantly viewing the work of others while also presenting our view of the world. Like the woman in the painting we can become either viewer or the viewed.

The contradictory state of being two beings is not a new state but it does give one pause for thought when one works with the medium of the computer. To produce a webpage that has a distinctive personality from all of the other webpages challenged m; there is no single person within the persona---there are two. And because the Vermeer image creates a space in time and of light, the feeling is ethereal. The woman can be any woman and she will always feel the light shining on her, in a state of perpetual radiance.

So taking her image and placing it on to the webpage was one way of getting the view of a woman and it also presented me with how woman were viewed in Vermeer's time. Obviously, the image of a woman can mean many things. Within the domestic sphere, being a woman means that you are restricted and must remain within the private world of the home. But Vermeer gave us an out---there is a window and with that the possibility of escape to the public sphere and its many attractions. Who knows what the women of this time period were thinking? Often in our historical records we do not hear the thoughts of women but we can see in Vermeer's image that light and women were linked together, thereby posing us an interesting idea: did Vermeer capture only the daytime persona? Did women of this era have other personae? The art survives and presents us with an idea of what life was like for women in certain spheres, but what about the views of the women?