The Most Important Thing Is to Get the HTML Right
Jens Meiert, September 26, 2008 / October 2, 2008.
This entry is filed under Web Development, Accessibility, User Experience.
… meaning really right when it comes to modern, high quality web development.
Why? Because it’s the markup that provides meaning and is important for accessibility, that is key to maintainability since otherwise bottleneck, that can have a significant impact on performance, and that is, assuming decent content, prerequisite for success.
What does that mean yet imply? While learning HTML is not that hard, writing good HTML requires robust knowledge and experience to leave out irrelevant stuff and avoid maintenance traps. More importantly, putting emphasis on HTML mastery moves complexity to styling and scripting, meaning that in order to write really elegant, simple, maintainable HTML, even more solid understanding and experience of CSS and DOM is required in order to offer the presentation and behavior that is necessary.
So we need to keep in mind: Changing documents is always more expensive than changing style sheets and scripts, but reducing the probability of document changes to the absolute minimum adds up to the challenges on both styling and scripting side.
Most of you are aware of that, but I felt I had to stress that again. There are decent posts out there that explain what I mean in more detail, including, that’s my hope, the collection of popular posts available on this site.
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Enjoy the most popular posts, probably including:
Comments
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On September 28, 2008, 16:08 CEST, Kroc Camen said:
I was finishing up an article very much about quality HTML when you posted this - so for the benefit of readers interested in the semantics of the abbr element, here’s my guide:
http://camendesign.com/code/using-abbr -
On September 30, 2008, 18:15 CEST, Jens Meiert said:
Kroc, thanks for sharing.
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On November 5, 2008, 22:36 CET, Buzu said:
Kroc Camen, I read your article, and since there is no comments section, I’m forced to comment trough here. There are a couple of thinks that I disagree with. First, an acronym and an abbreviation are two completely different things, and there is an acronym element to describe acronyms. Abbreviations are not used to describe how something should be read.
The example in which you use php is not a citation, it is an acronym. I think you should consider reviewing your article. Not everything is wrong, but some important points are. Just as Jens points out in this article, “While learning HTML is not that hard, writing good HTML requires robust knowledge and experience”. BTW, this is an example of a citation, and “BTW” is an example of an acronym.
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On November 7, 2008, 14:43 CET, Kroc Camen said:
@Buzu
ⅰ You are not forced to comment here, you can easily email me, my email address is available throughout my site, and in case you were unable to find it: kroccamen@gmail.com. What you meant, I presume, is that you wanted to publicly comment—blogs can be had for free anywhere, which I note, you have one.
ⅱ The acronym element was removed in HTML5. I only write HTML5 now. I am fully aware of the differences between abbreviations and acronyms.
ⅲ The New Oxford American English Dictionary defines an abbreviation as “a shortened form of a word or phrase.”, which makes my article correct, given the markup.
