Jens Oliver Meiert

Semantics

Rote Learning HTML & CSS.

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“HTML First” Is Not HTML First

On what is and what isn’t “HTML First.” (It’s not just a hunch: It should start with HTML.)

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The 6 Ways of Writing HTML (and Their Combinations)

There are 6 general ways of writing HTML: unsystematic, valid, semantic, accessible, required-only, and hyper-optimized. These types make for 19 combinations—the ways we write HTML.

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HTML Concepts: Common Idioms

Welcome to another brief post in the “HTML Concepts” series. Today we’re going to look at common idioms: popular design patterns for which HTML doesn’t have dedicated elements, but makes suggestions.

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Use the “i” Element, and Use It Appropriately

“Use em instead of i” is in the Top 25 of bad advice you can get in HTML development. The two elements have different meanings, the blunt rule ignores all context, and i is a valid element with legitimate use cases.

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A Vision of Web Development

There is one thing every web developer should aspire to: writing the most minimal, semantically appropriate, valid HTML, and then never changing it. “Never” not in a sense of denial and refusal, but in the sense of a guiding light…

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HTML Explained in 123 Tweets: The Google #htmltuesday Archive

Did you know that Google’s Webmaster Team tweeted short statements about all HTML elements, every week, for two and a half years? It was called “#htmltuesday” and ran from 2011 to 2013. All of these tweets are now available in one place: here.

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The Curious Case of Breadcrumbs in HTML

We had an interesting thread about breadcrumbs on W3C’s public-html the other day. At first just targeting delimiters, it spawned a debate about the appropriate markup. Here’s my view on breadcrumbs in HTML.

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On Semantics in HTML

As web developers we like to talk about “semantic markup,” a somehow inaccurate short form for “markup that is meaningful and used how it’s supposed to be used.” But where is all that meaning coming from? Let’s take a look.

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The 3 Ground Rules for Writing HTML

The fundamentals every web developer should know: on respecting syntax and semantics, avoiding presentational and behavioral markup, and leaving out everything that is not absolutely necessary.

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The Most Important Thing Is to Get the HTML Right

Why? Because it’s the markup that makes for most of the code of a site and is hence key to cost efficiency and maintainability; because it carries meaning and is important for accessibility; because it often has an impact on performance; and because it is the prerequisite for online success.

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Ăśber-Semantics

Premasagar Rose recently published a great demonstration of what can be considered “über-semantic” code. I guess we can thank the microformats community here, which carefully avoids to rely on the semantics of HTML elements but…

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HTML: Semantics of “title” Element Content

I already proposed this in October 2005 but see the need to bring it up again: It would be useful to allow other elements within the title of an HTML document. Why? You otherwise cannot mark abbreviations and other flow content elements, which means their meaning gets lost…

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