What is the thesis of this article?

Throughout the article, Carpenter continually refers to the idea of the “handmade web”. This refers to a webpage which is coded by an individual rather than a software and which creates a more unique webpage experience. In his perspective, the handmade web is a way of coding that has gone out of general style, but which still contains great value. The article educates the reader on those many values. In so doing, Carpenter’s thesis becomes clear: in a world of coding that is increasingly becoming commercialized, it is the handmade web pages which become a form of resistance, and thus a form of art. In his words, “The more proprietary, predatory, and puerile a place the web becomes, the more committed I am to using it in poetic and intransigent ways” (Carpenter, “A Handmade Web”). The handmade web is what built the World Wide Web, and Carpenter believes that it is relevant and meaningful to hearken back to it.

Carpenter describes the handmade web as a form of resistance. In your own words, what is being resisted?

Since its invention, the internet has been used as a means for businesses and individuals to advertise and communicate with others. Within a short 40 years, the ability to create those webpages with which to communicate has drastically improved. So much so that the World Wide Web has become largely mainstreamed. As our understanding of technology has increased, so has the professionalism of our webpages. The handmade web harkens back to those early days of webpages where personal style, creativity, and maintenance were used. Thus, the handmade web resists the coding impulse to use a mainstreamed, commercialized, software-generated user experience. Creating a handmade web admittedly takes more time and energy to produce and maintain, but it is a way to combat the increasing rise of speedy corporations which produce functional but ultimately boring and impersonalized webpages. By resisting this easier way, we might see more artistic and meaningful webpages created which will improve our World Wide Web.

Reflecting on your own experiences, what are other examples of drawing attention the "physicality" of the web?

It used to be that the handheld mouse was perhaps the only directly physical act involved with the web. But just as our webpages have improved over the 40-year internet span, so has our device technology. With touch screen devices like tablets and mobile phones, physicality involved with webpages has increased substantially. Instead of having a mouse do the work, our own hands can more fluidly swipe the screen up, down, left, and right. In fact, the term “swipe left” has come to mean much more in today’s culture, only made possible because of physical interaction with an app. As well as using our hands to interact with the web, we can use our voices too. Speech to text enables us to have our own words appear on our screen without using our hands at all. And as our VR technology improves, one can only guess that it will have a place on webpages in the future.