The importance of HTML
I just came across an article on HTML, and it was a surprising read for me. First of all I feel like I should say that I am not a professional web developer. I am not employed in the field and I've never worked on any large projects except my own website. Because of this, I probably am not following the current trends in web development. I learned some basic web development through a course I took many years ago, combined with a lot of self guided learning and research. Since I started learning the basics, the real basics, I learned HTML and CSS and that is really all you need to know to make static web pages. You can add some fancy effects and other types of additional functionality through Javascript. And that has always been my view of the basics, Javascript is for additional functionality and should not be a requirement. My whole website works without Javascript, with just a few exceptions (account creation, comment posting, and the contact form).
Dynamic websites, such as this, are a little more complicated since they connect to a database. Such websites will obviously need a bit more components to run, but the final product that is served to the browser is HTML, usually along with CSS to style the content. It just never occurred to me that you would build a website without writing the HTML yourself. There are these Javascript frameworks which obfuscates the HTML, and I have heard of them before. Web developers working with such a framework will not actually need to write a single line of HTML. It was still my impression that people who work with this still know HTML well. I always thought that such frameworks were more suited to building these single-page websites where everything is accessed from a single URL. But then I came across the aforementioned article which delves a bit deeper into this topic.
Apparently, there are web developers, in particular, front-end developers, who don't know how to write a full HTML page. This is incomprehensible to me, but I can also see how that would happen. There will always be someone who thinks something can be simplified, and then creates some kind of framework to hide the real details. The intent is to make life easier for everyone, just stop caring about the details and use this new fancy framework. This might work in some cases, but in my opinion it really just adds another layer of complexity. I realize that not everyone might share my opinion on the matter, but simplicity has always been a goal of mine in any project I work on. Keep the number of moving parts low, and you greatly decrease the number of things that might go wrong.
It should still be noted that my opinions are that of an amateur, lacking in professional experience in the field. But building this website from scratch was a lot of work, and I would never want to add more complexity to my project. By keeping things simple, it is so much easier to both maintain my work and build upon it.
The article I am talking about can be found at this address: https://www.petelambert.com/journal/html-is-the-web (opens in a new tab).
Categories: Web Development
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