Foreword
It’s impressive how much effort we’ve put into optimizing the way we write and organize our CSS and JavaScript files, especially in the last 10 years. We went from writing large files to splitting code into components; we care about maintainability, performance, modularity, and scalability. While there are also downsides to these developments, it’s great that we attempt to get the best out of frontend languages.
At the same time, it seems that we’ve forgotten to put similar effort into the quality of our markup. Documents are bloated, inaccessible, most pages contain invalid HTML, and we only use a fraction of the 110+ elements we have at our disposal. It’s hard to pin down the exact reasons, but it’s fair to say that the Web is in a bad shape and we should pay more attention to writing clean and semantic documents. We can do that by starting to question our code as well as code provided by frameworks and libraries.
In this little book, Jens Oliver Meiert shares 10 examples where he does exactly that; he takes code from real websites and tries to optimize them right down to the last detail. While his approach is radical in some cases, the message counts: analyze, scrutinize, optimize. Take Jens’s advice and upgrade your HTML, so your users will benefit from clean and semantic HTML documents.