Intro
Upgrade your HTML. Why would you need to do that? HTML is old, HTML is easy! Can’t you, can’t we write HTML?
We’re certainly able to, but we can’t reliably put it into practice yet. Not from what we see in the millions of HTML documents and templates making millions of sites and apps out there.
That we’re not reliably writing good HTML is the premise of this book series, that now enters its third year. Let’s have a look at the introduction for the first part, released in October, 2019:
[…] not everyone writes good HTML. There are many reasons for that.
The most important one is that HTML isn’t actually that easy, because it really is complex. Want an example?
HTML 5.2, which is the last HTML recommendation by the W3C […], contains 111 elements alone. 111. How many do you know? How many does the average web developer know? What does it mean for their markup if they don’t know all the elements?
Want another example? When people talk about HTML elements like
htmloraorp, then most of the time they do mean elements. But what they then talk about is “tags.” Google, as of September, 2019, finds 25 million occurrences of “html tags” alone. HTML elements, what people mean, but don’t call by name? 2.4 million hits, a tenth. This begs the question how well developers understand HTML […].Another one? In a few years, HTML will celebrate its 30th birthday. Very cool! We will certainly have maxed out all options to reduce HTML payload to improve performance, wouldn’t we? Well, no. One of the major options at our disposal to reduce HTML payload is not to write HTML that can be left out without a document turning invalid […]. Unfortunately, almost no one uses that option.
We still need to keep all HTML elements (and attributes, and rules) in mind. We still need to watch for the use of correct terminology. We still can’t speak of HTML being mastered, let alone being exhausted yet.
Therefore, we can keep upgrading our HTML. Therefore, I can keep writing this series. Therefore, we can enjoy looking at the HTML on the Web and enjoy making it better.
This joy is important. The point of this book series is certainly to teach about the craft of writing HTML. But it’s also about the joy of writing HTML, and of writing better HTML. If you’ve read one of the first parts of this series, you may have found some of the material joyful. If you haven’t read one yet, I hope you will enjoy this third part. HTML is pretty cool—let’s now review and work with 10 more examples.
—Jens Oliver Meiert