HTML is the Web
petelambert.com
HTML is the Web
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Re: HTML is the Web
#2Nobody is claiming HTML is not necessary. It's just not sufficient.
Re: HTML is the Web
#3I pretty much agree with all the article. Back in 2001, when Web Standards were on the rise, people used to validate their HTML code. It was shown as a badge of prestige when you had 0 errors. Semantic HTML was a hot topic and most of the developers I worked with were a sort of HTML taliban. But the popularity of frameworks helped developers forget the basics and concentrate more on learning how to get the most out of these projects. If we also sum that I don't see true impact on SEO by having the best HTML I think it's pretty clear semantics and validation isn't relevant anymore.
When people ask me why SEO isn't working. Well, try to see the first results on Google, and check their code. Most of the times you will see worsen HTML validation and semantics trumped over better (not perfect), not mentioning the first page is mostly paid ads. Google is not like back in the 2000s. Things has changed.
Re: HTML is the Web
#4Unfortunately, a lot of people don't care...
Re: HTML is the Web
#5A Web page is a document.
No it's not. It never was. Even a long time ago when websites were static things rendered by the browser once and then left alone there was always a tree of nodes underlying everything. The only thing that's changed in the past three decades is that now when we make websites and web apps we often ship a little JS application that lets the user modify the underlying tree. That's what the web is now and HTML is just what we use to describe the initial state of the tree (and arguably it's the wrong language for that job, but hey ho). Using semantic markup is important for a bunch of things like accessibility, but you can't really expect the initial state of the page to stay the same after it's loaded, and software that renders things from the web has to deal with that.
If you're old enough you might remember that once there were no stylesheets. HTML wasn't just the content and structure, but also the visual description. We used font tags. We used color attributes. We used spacer gifs. We don't do that now because it sucked. We moved forwards. The same is becoming true for HTML. Users demanded interactivity, and we gave them exactly that, and browsers turned in to things that run little applications rather than things that render mark up. The web has grown and evolved and moved on, and thinking of the web as "HTML pages" is just plain out of date.
That's not to say static content isn't still useful. It is. Very useful. But static HTML pages isn't the web, and the single page application genie isn't going back in the bottle.
Re: HTML is the Web
#6A Web page is a document. No it's not. It never was. Even a long time ago when websites were static things rendered by the browser once and then left alone there was always a tree of nodes underlying everything. The only thing that's changed in the past three decades is that now when we make websites and web apps we often ship a little JS application that lets the user modify the underlying tree. That's what the web…
> We moved forwards. The same is becoming true for HTML. Users demanded interactivity, and we gave them exactly that, and browsers turned in to things that run little applications rather than things that render mark up.
As I like to occasionally point out in wasm threads, the browser was a thing that ran little applications all along, in the form of Java applets. I have yet to see an explanation of how wasm applets are a different approach to the problem, but they sure are a more popular one.
Re: HTML is the Web
#7I pretty much agree with all the article. Back in 2001, when Web Standards were on the rise, people used to validate their HTML code. It was shown as a badge of prestige when you had 0 errors. Semantic HTML was a hot topic and most of the developers I worked with were a sort of HTML taliban. But the popularity of frameworks helped developers forget the basics and concentrate more on learning how to get the most out o…
All my webpages had the valid xhtml badge!
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Valid_XHTML_1.0.svg
I still have a hard time un-learning ``
Re: HTML is the Web
#8As much as I like the sentiment, in my opinion HTML is very much a means to an end - that end being delivering content to your end consumers.
I was very much behind the "separation of concerns" brigade (with respect to HTML/CSS/JS) a few years ago, but the invent of React/Angular etc. and the "component driven architecture" has seen an end to that.
It's a shame - from my perspective, new entrants into the front-end market lack much of the knowledge I'd regard as fundamental even a few years back (most saliently for me TypeScript/ES2015 obscuring JS's prototypal inheritance) - but its also understandable.
Re: HTML is the Web
#9Unpopular opinion... but I think this is a too limited view of the web. My contrary opinion is that the actually important feature of the web is the URL, and the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code without a builtin "walled garden moral police".
It would be nice if operating systems would be exactly that, but for some reason "commercial" OS vendors are not able or willing to provide a safe "native" sandbox completely uncoupled from curated app stores.
The ability of a browser to be a document viewer with a very limited layout system should be implemented in an optional layer on top of a bare bones browser.
Again, this should all be provided by the underlying operating systems (click an URL and instantly run cross-platform applications in a safe sandbox), but for some reason we didn't get that. It's the same with Electron apps by the way, those wouldn't exist if operating systems would come with cross-platform UI frameworks that are actually better than the unholy mix of HTML+CSS+JS. But Microsoft, Apple etc... had decades to get their act together without delivering.
Re: HTML is the Web
#10A Web page is a document. No it's not. It never was. Even a long time ago when websites were static things rendered by the browser once and then left alone there was always a tree of nodes underlying everything. The only thing that's changed in the past three decades is that now when we make websites and web apps we often ship a little JS application that lets the user modify the underlying tree. That's what the web…
It is, definitions of HTML are widely clear: "Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser." If a document has interactivity, that doesn't mean it will lose its definition.