The practice of writing marginalia is as old as writing itself. Particularly in books produced before the printing press, marginalia often formed dialogues between readers, as these books were handcrafted and passed down through generations. While our engagement with physical books remains, we frequently encounter digital texts, code-based texts, and hypertexts. This leads us to ponder: what are the margins of a webpage or a code?

Challenging the perception of digital text as intangible and flat, we strive to explore its materialities and possibilities for inscription and relation. In source codes, we confront the notion that code is best-practice when it lacks comments and is deemed self-explanatory. Commenting on code, however, makes the writing process more legible for writers, readers, learners, and inspectors. We propose using comments in source code not just for describing or crediting steps, but as a margin that provides space for process documentation, conversation, and the otherwise overlooked or deemed 'unimportant'.

Every webpage’s source code is accessible through built-in web inspector tools in browsers, a starting point that forms a margin to the text on site. for this workshop's practical component, we will bring a selection of digital texts. You will be invited to write your own annotations, comments, and interpretations, exploring how these marginal notes can shape and add dimension to the source-code. A basic understanding of HTML will be helpful but is not required.