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posted by martyb on Tuesday July 02 2019, @04:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the lawns dept.

"Front-end" developer, Pete Lambert, writes about why front-end "web" developers should start to learn HTML. More and more developers are using only pre-made frameworks and quite unfamiliar with the fundmentals of the technology they are using, such as semantic markup. He notes that the continued failure to pay attention to the basics of semantics is slowly breaking what's left of the World Wide Web and suggests reasons to correct that and has some pointers to learning resources.

I’m a ‘frontend of the frontend’ kind of guy. My expertise is in HTML and CSS, so it’s easy for me to wax lyrical about why everybody should learn what I already know (for the record, I don’t know it all - we still have heated debates in the office about what the best way to mark up a certain component might be). This isn’t about ‘my job’s more important than yours. If you’re writing code that renders things in a browser, this is your job.

It’s about usability and accessibility. If you don’t think the semantic structure of your Web page or app is important then you’re essentially saying “Well, it works for me in my browser, ship it”. I don’t think you’d do that with your Javascript and you certainly shouldn’t be doing it with your CSS. Search engines need to read your content, not enjoy your swoopy animations or fancy gradients. Screen reader software needs to read your content. Keyboard users need to read your content. Who knows what technology will come next and how it will consume your app but I’ll bet my bottom Bitcoin it’ll work better if it can easily read, parse and traverse your content. The way these things read your content is that they know it’s actually content and not just strings of text wrapped in meaningless tags. They know what’s a table and how to present it, they know what’s a list and how to present it, they know what’s a button and what’s a checkbox. Make everything from divs and they’re going to have to work bloody hard to figure that out.

Earlier on SN:
How to Build and Host an Energy Efficient Web Site (2018)
Conservative Web Development (2018)
Dodgy Survey Shows 1 in 10 Believe HTML is an STD? (2014)


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Tuesday July 02 2019, @09:02PM (3 children)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Tuesday July 02 2019, @09:02PM (#862542) Journal

    And given that we're talking about HTML here, it would be even *more* useful in that space.

    Any good text editor provides for a preview pane where you can view HTML, Markdown, etc. in it's already formatted form, while the actual source code is editable in the plain vanilla pane.

    Most of them use OS-level HTML rendering engines, so generally, you do see exactly what you're going to get for most reasonable sets of HTML formatting.

    I use a macro language that gives me exactly what I want, generating the CSS and HTML according to my personal specifications. Works great, nothing out of reach or hidden. It brings the ability to create any reusable formatting tool or toolkit I like to every formatting job, with the additional strength of write-once/debug-once. That's what generated this post, in fact.

    For instance, when it turns out that some CSS thing needs a fix for browser X (not uncommon, because CSS is an out-of-control mutant), then (if I give a damn about browser X), it's one change to the macro and the entire suite of pages is fixed.

    None of which would do me any good at all if I didn't have a decent handle on HTML/CSS markup.

    --
    Patience: What you exercise when there are too many witnesses.

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  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Tuesday July 02 2019, @09:49PM (2 children)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Tuesday July 02 2019, @09:49PM (#862548) Journal

    Sigh... in first para, "it's" should be "its."

    I've known this for fifty years, and I still do it without thinking.

    --
    A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single schlep

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Tuesday July 02 2019, @10:48PM (1 child)

      Perhaps you should have this [ambians.com] tattooed on this inside of your eyelids:

      It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it
      is. If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's. It
      isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs.
                                      -- Oxford University Press, Edpress News

      Just sayin'.

      --
      No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
      • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Tuesday July 02 2019, @11:14PM

        by fyngyrz (6567) on Tuesday July 02 2019, @11:14PM (#862569) Journal

        oy, lol

        --
        The only thing flat-earthers have to fear is sphere itself.