Why View Source Matters

I learned to code by right-clicking on websites and selecting "View Source." I suspect many of you did too.

This is remarkable if you think about it. No other medium works this way. You can't pause a film and see the screenplay. You can't open a book and see the typesetting instructions. But on the web, the code is the content, and it has always been visible.

The Democratizing Force

View Source is the web's greatest democratizing force. It means that anyone with a browser has access to a library of code examples as vast as the web itself. Every website is a tutorial. Every page is an example.

When I was learning HTML in the late 1990s, I would:

1. Find a website that did something cool
2. View the source code
3. Copy the parts I didn't understand
4. Paste them into my own page
5. Modify things until I understood what they did

This is how an entire generation of web developers learned their craft. Not from textbooks or bootcamps, but from the open, inspectable nature of the web itself.

The Threat

Modern web development has made View Source less useful. Minified bundles, obfuscated class names, and compiled output bear little resemblance to the code that developers actually wrote. When you View Source on a modern web application, you see a <div id="root"></div> and a massive JavaScript bundle.

This isn't necessarily bad — these tools exist for good reasons. But we should be aware of what we're trading away.

Preserving the Spirit

We can preserve the spirit of View Source even in a world of complex build tools:

• Open source your projects
• Write readable code that others can learn from
• Use semantic HTML that describes content, not presentation
• Remember that someone might be learning from your code

The web taught itself to code through View Source. Let's make sure the next generation can do the same.