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"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)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pino P on Wednesday July 03 2019, @01:38PM (2 children)
In part, you can blame payment processing costs for that.
In a capitalist economy, it costs money to feed and house yourself while writing articles for a website. Any website not operated as a hobby or as a brochure for some other product needs to pay its writers somehow. Pay-per-page doesn't work when Visa and Mastercard demand a minimum transaction fee on the order of 0.30 USD. A monthly subscription doesn't work for readers interested in viewing only one document, such as an article found through SoylentNews, through a link shared by a friend, or through a web search engine.
The traditional model to derive revenue from single page views has been advertising. But over the years, advertisers have become pickier about demanding that ad networks show their messages only to those readers most likely to be interested in them. To accomplish this, ad networks have engaged in widespread surveillance of readers to infer their interests, and dozens of ad networks competing for a single page view can add up to megabytes of crap. One common measure to ensure that ads are viewed is to make the site dependent on proprietary script run in the reader's web browser.
More recently, a third business model has emerged called a benefit corporation [wikipedia.org]. This allows a company's charter to put a mission benefiting the public over the shareholder profit motive. SoylentNews, for example, is organized as a benefit corporation. But a benefit corporation is not available in all jurisdictions or in all situations. The Guardian has behaved similarly, offering perks for subscribing but not putting up a subscription requirement as many comparable publications have. The risk here is that if not enough subscriptions roll in, the site will have to close.
The nuclear option is to close all websites that are not operated as a hobby or as a brochure for some other product. This option has its proponents on the green site (1 [slashdot.org], 2 [slashdot.org], 3 [slashdot.org]). But this would result in widespread structural unemployment, and it might reduce the demand for home Internet access to the point where ISPs no longer see economies of scale in providing affordable home broadband for those people who do primarily visit hobby sites. So is there a better business model to pay the writers?
(Score: 1) by Z-A,z-a,01234 on Friday July 05 2019, @11:51AM (1 child)
I see your point. I don't fully agree, since there are counter-examples like the youtube channels funded via Patreon (youtube pays way to little per view)
I'll have to try a subscription to a newspaper and check if the premium offer has significantly lower size per page. I'm willing to bet that it will still be 70+% of the original, free version.
Broadband is also manly used for video / audio and less for text. As long we have youtube and netflix, and prime, all good :)
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday July 05 2019, @03:25PM
What I wrote in the previous comment applies equally to Patreon with a substitution of terms: "If not enough pledges roll in, the channel will have to close."
If the Internet is cut back to only hobby sites, you might end up having to go back to dial-up. Would you prefer dial-up?