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Always bet on HTML

html code from my personal website

The title of this post came to my mind after reading Twitter post on Feb 9th by Andy Bell:

What’s your favourite programming language? Mine’s HTML.

It’s powerful, efficient, declarative, backwards AND forwards compatible and most importantly, user-friendly.

If there’s errors, it just carries on, prioritising getting the content to the user.

What a smashing language.

Source: Twitter

That's so true, and reminded me the famous quote by Brendan Eich's "Always bet on JavaScript".

It's astonishing to think that HTML is almost 30 years old, first version was released in 1992, and it's still evolving in order to keep the pace with current needs of web developers.

Andy post remarks the first and fundamental goal of HTML: representing the content; content that can be served without CSS and JavaScript by several channels, think about RSS readers, screen readers, and other assistive techs, wearables, etc.

This is often forgotten, especially by web developers who depend too much on web frameworks: these piece of software helps by hiding complexity, but they have a very bad side effect since they create a technical debt that in the long term is difficult to reduce.

Learning and knowing the basics is important in all things, and web development makes no exception.


Sincerely,

Marcello