Episode 4, Delectable Mountains, in which Mip and Mop learn what a browser does. geniwate.com/admin/mipandmop

1. geniwate.com/admin/mipandmop
Concept based on The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan,
and written for Contemporary Media Work Practices,
a course at RMIT University
(www.rmit.edu.au)
c. geniwate 2012-5
Delectable Mountains 4

2. What’s you’re name, anyway?, Mop
asked the shepherd as they were finishing
their first coded page.
You can call me ‘404 Erro’. And he
laughed a huge hollow laugh that
bounced from mountain rock to mountain
rock and echoed above their heads.
Mip and Mop instantly backed away.
They’d heard whispers about 404 Error in
Vanity Fair and he sounded like a real
dead-end guy. And what did it mean to be
with 404 Error? Could they be that lost?
There was no signal on their mobile
phones. Were they dead?

3. Don’t worry’, 404 Error replied. ‘You can still get out. You’ve just got to create your escape route.’
Mip and Mop were not completely reassured, but they didn’t know what else to do but try to
work out what 404 Error meant. ‘You’re going to need to understand how a url is properly
formed. What an index page is. How to use forward slashes. Absolute and relative links. The File
structure of websites. ‘The publish it and see if it works. But I’ve got to go water the goats now.’
‘But….’ Mip called after him. But it was no good. Soon they were alone with the whistling wind
and the desolation. Mop set about trying to lift a slice of rock off the mountainside. It appeared to
be shale (was it always shale, or was that a new development), so it wasn’t too bad. They chipped
their code onto the rock.

4. ‘What do you think 404 Error meant by publishing it?’, Mop asked. ‘He
didn’t mean a blog’.
‘I think he’s referring to the old fashioned way of making a website. Web
1.0’, Mip replied. Easy enough where everything is wysiwyg, but out here
there are no buttons to push.’
They started climbing up the slope. The air was getting thinner, but there
was a track of sorts - people had done this before. Indeed, one of the small
hermetic creatures that lived there passed them on his way down.
Eventually they reached the crown of the mountain, and they passed
under an arch which read ‘File Transfer Protocol’. There were lots of
inscribed rocks up here, carefully laid out like tiles. They put theirs down.
Made no difference.
‘What if we stand on it’, Mop wondered. They did, and -

5. -They were home. That is, they were in their HTML, looking at how their
code displayed. There was the picture that Mop had taken; there was the
poem that Mip had written, and the world was suddenly coloured green,
just the way they had written it. There was the link back to their blogs, but
Mip and Mop had no desire to go there now.
‘But where is the actual code we wrote?’ whispered Mop.
‘It must be here somewhere’, Mip replied. Only we can’t see it.’
‘I’ve got it!, Mop shouted. ‘It’s the browser! The browser is translating our
code and displaying it like this!’
‘Well done’, said 404 Error. ‘You don’t need me any more.’

6. File transfer protocol
(ftp)