HTML Matters

Rant time. No-one can deny that web development tooling has improved in leaps and bounds over the last few years. I’ll sound like a moaning old man if I talk about how primitive things were in the old days, so I won’t.

But despite this wealth of tools, loads of good quality information online, and access to resources and training why do I still regularly see HTML like this in new web projects:

<div class="footer">
<span><img src="twitter.gif" /></span>
<span><img src="facebook.gif" /></span>
<span><img src="instagram.gif" /></span>
</div>

It appears modern web developers have within their grasp a panoply of development and build tools – NPM, bower, gulp, grunt etc – but don’t have access to HTML elements which have been implemented in browsers for years. HTML matters!

It matters because structure matters. Meaning matters. Semantics matter (but don’t go overboard). Accessibility matters. For many projects, SEO matters.

A web page is, at it’s core, a structured document. Pile on all the fancy-pants JavaScript frameworks you want, but you’re still delivering HTML to a rendering engine built in a browser. If you’re making no effort to use appropriate HTML elements to mark up your content then you need to sharpen up your skills.