selling html pt1
It's sad, but true. 2010 is rapidly approaching, but as front-end developers we still have a tough time selling the importance of well-written html. Many attempts have been made these last 10 years, but it all amounted to very little. Clean html is the first priority to go whenever problems arise within a project. For those of you still fighting with much conviction and spirit, the next two articles will help you conquer those who oppose you.
What puzzles me most is how differently html is approached when it comes to quality. Compare it to programming languages or human languages and you'll see a frightening gap in quality perception. Of course there are some understandable reasons for this, but after 10 years of hmtl-awareness you would assume that people would start to grasp the need for improvement.
about languages
We all know that html is a descriptive language, with its own spelling and grammar rules. Much like the human languages in fact. We write it to describe elements within a page, giving meaning to components and making it possible for automated features to recognize these components and process the data for whatever reason possible.
The html language is a very simple language with few words. To cover for the unknown elements we have the div element, equivalent of the English word "thing". Further specification is done through classes giving our "thing" extra semantic meaning. For elements that do have an equivalent in html, we use the assigned tags. This all sounds very logical, but the reality is quite different.
draconian error handling
The difference? In case of human languages it's our brain doing the error handling. We are interfacing directly with the language. In case of html, we interface with the product of the language (the actual web page), not the language generating the page. That's why it's not immediately apparent when the html of a page is full of grammar and spelling mistakes, as the browser effectively hides (almost) all the ugliness from us.
Ai coud rait laik dis and with a little bit of effort you would be able to read it perfectly well. Still, people would be quite annoyed if I wrote entire articles likes that, no matter how interesting the content. But when talking about html, people don't seem to care, even when it's bordering on complete nonsense. Since there's an automated service trying its best to cope with these errors, it appears to be free for all.
history
To be fair, this way of handling html did help to launch the internet. It eclipses some of its finer points and helped in getting things online for people to see. In many cases, badly marked up content is better than no content at all. But for professional websites, it is time we stop ignoring the potential of html, as its current state is actively hindering the progress of the internet today. Semantics in combination with automated processing is an area still very much underdeveloped, partly due to bad html structure and grammar.
conclusion
While there are little arguments against well-written html, it's a sad fact that all I've written above will usually get you nowhere. For now, html is still considered a low priority, and when CMS or other automated html-generating tools remain spewing grammatically incorrect code.
When you compare it to human languages you will make people understand, but at the same time the argument is too theoretical to have much weight when a crisis is looming. Next article will delve a little deeper into more practical weapons to battle the rapers of html. Stay tuned.