Building a website vs building a house

March 23, 2018 12:25 PM

Where did the bridge between housing development and web development occur? How come we say “I build webpages/websites”, which seems to present an analogy to “building” (in the conceptual sense) a house, or some other physical object?

When you “build” a website, you are actually sitting and creating code in order to present, in cyberspace, an interactive and imaginative creation that you brought up in your head. You actually did create this thing, and although the physical constructs of the data exist on a server somewhere, people still physically interact with the construction that you made.

So when and where did the bridging of terms that represent “building”, as in “I build houses”, begin to morph into “I build websites”? “Build” almost always comes up as a physical action, it’s something you do in reality and there is a physical object to show from your labor, but “building” a website isn’t exactly the same. Although the labor is still knowable, it’s definitely different than “building” a house, or even if we went smaller, “building” a bird feeder, or something similar. I can go and “build” a website, but that seems like a wholly different, although similar, concept when compared to “building” something physical, such as a bird feeder.

posted by gucci mane to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

I think "building" has always had an abstract or metaphorical meaning alongside the concrete one you're describing. For example, we talk about "building a family" or "building an empire" or describe the action in a story as "building."
posted by brook horse at 12:50 PM on March 23, 2018 [5 favorites]

Building means to assemble something from constituent parts, either directly or indirectly (a real estate developer builds condos, but doesn't go out with a hammer and nails). The nonphysical/metaphorical meanings (as brook horse says, "building an empire" -- i.e. assembling a whole empire from constituent states or territories) have a long history:

In the United States, this verb is used with much more latitude than in England. There, as Fennimore Cooper puts it, everything is BUILT. The priest BUILDS up a flock; the speculator a fortune; the lawyer a reputation; the landlord a town; and the tailor, as in England, BUILDS up a suit of clothes. A fire is BUILT instead of made, and the expression is even extended to individuals, to be BUILT being used with the meaning of formed. [Farmer, "Slang and Its Analogues," 1890]

posted by Homeboy Trouble at 1:14 PM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'd much rather someone build a website than "architect" it.

But that's one of the best things about language to me. You can use words in a metaphorical way to make your statement more evocative.
posted by kevinbelt at 1:53 PM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

Because people wanted to add a handful of sweet "under construction" gifs to their geocities page.



More seriously, it's possible the term arrived directly from software building, ie, compiling the source code into something for end-users. And that, as mentioned, probably came from the basic definitions of "building" - making something new out of parts.
posted by lmfsilva at 2:12 PM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

Websites are actually made out of electrons on a physical substrate of chips, circuits, and hard drives, so, technically, they actually are a real, physical object, even if that is somewhat obfuscated.
posted by sexyrobot at 3:36 PM on March 23, 2018

Christopher Alexander's a Pattern Language relates the design of programs to the design of buildings. The connection existed long before the web was invented.
posted by batter_my_heart at 3:41 PM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

I started using "build" in 1996 because at the time there was pretty much just the words "webmaster" or "Designer" to describe what I did. I never liked those terms and felt that "builder" described the more nuts and bolts nature of my skill set. I placed "Built by Kinnikinnick Designs" at the bottom of my first site and have done so for the last 22 years. I'm sure I picked up on it from other developer's credit lines.
posted by humboldt32 at 4:31 PM on March 23, 2018

When I started working in web development clients would be handed off to "project managers" who would do everything for the client: the strategy, the mock-ups, design, coding, all of it. The discrete phases of the project borrowed a lot from physical construction terms because the analogy was easy for clients to understand. This was 1995 or so? Almost all web terminology and design was based on physical analogy. A lot of websites were even designed to look like rooms where you would click on physical objects in them.
posted by xammerboy at 5:49 PM on March 23, 2018

Best answer: Just to give a early citation of the use of the term "build" in software development, consider this snippet from the first GNU bulletin from February 1986:

Currently has a bug: exhausts pure Lisp code space while building Emacs.

I'm fairly certain if we go poking around more historical computer documentation (e.g.: as found on bitsavers.org), we'd find even earlier examples.
posted by mhum at 6:17 PM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Everyone here has given amazing examples that I’m looking into. I guess what I’m looking for is the concept of “building a house”, as a physical concept, and anything associated with the word “building” or “build” as a physical meaning, versus “building a webpage” or “website”, which takes place in “cyberspace”. It’s not exactly “physical”, although there is a showing of your labor and work behind a website. But it’s not as if you physically presented that. You can build a flock of goats, and somebody can look and watch that happen, that’s still a physical observance though. You can watch somebody “build” a website, by coding, but you see it in a sphere that is in cyberspace. It’s not as if you built a house.
posted by gucci mane at 7:30 PM on March 23, 2018

The use of the word “build” has been in common parlance in web development for as long as the web’s been around. For that matter, it’s common to refer to a particular release of a version as a “build”. It’s accepted industry terminology that no doubt bled over from previously existing related fields. Certainly it’s been a thing since I started doing web design in 1995.

The use of “architect” in web development is also a real term with a real meaning. It’s not just another word for a web designer, although the architecture of a site is part of web design and development. An information architect plans the form and functionality of a site before it is built, which eliminates a lot of error and expense that occur when changes have to be made during development. Smaller sites don’t really require this, but large sites with tens of thousands of pages almost certainly have IAs and other UX specialists laying the groundwork.
posted by Autumnheart at 8:19 PM on March 23, 2018

The term build for software development generally means the compiling and/or linking of code to create applications or libraries (that's what the above GNU bulletin is referring to). For example, you may run the "make" command which uses a "Makefile" that gives instructions on how to build the project. The building is not done by the software developer, but by the make command.

Website building is often (but not always) not coding, but assembling various existing pieces together, to construct a viable website.
posted by ShooBoo at 10:26 PM on March 23, 2018 [3 favorites]

You can "build an argument (or case)" for or against something - nothing physical involved.
posted by trialex at 3:21 PM on March 25, 2018