Small Initiatives

Following is Issue 35 of The Sensible Internet Design Letter [ archive | subscribe ].

What you see is what you might get, only if the moon is near the seventh sign ... besides, learning the alternative is harder than learning HTML.

If you write, edit, illustrate, design or otherwise help produce a Web site, I want to reintroduce you to an old friend.

Say hello to Hypertext Markup Language. That's right, HTML.

I feel compelled to reintroduce HTML because I know the development side of Web content management has been so intensely focused on hiding this friend from you.

Maybe you use Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage to manage Web page content, happy with the word-processor-style toolbars and the what-you-see-is-sorta-what-you-get view of each Web document.

Or maybe you use a database-driven content management system -- whether modified from open-source software (you'll find plenty on SourceForge); commercial applications I bet your company paid too much for; or home-grown systems built just to run your site. No matter. They're all designed specifically to let you create Web stuff without fear of ever seeing HTML.

The rationale, as I hear it, goes like this:

"People who write or edit for a living don't want to be bothered with all those nested tags or any stuff that looks like code. So let's give them software that shows them how a page will look based on computer-generated guesses of what they intended."

Hogwash. HTML is easy for anyone who ever used a word processor older than Microsoft Word. For that matter, if all you've ever used to write is Word, HTML should seem downright simple.

At least, HTML is probably simpler than learning the content management system you use to avoid it.

Come back to your roots. Learn HTML. You'll be a happier maker of Web things.

Here's why:

This is not your father's HTML: If your last look at HTML coding included all those browser-specific extensions meant to make it into a page design language, that's so five years ago.

I wouldn't want to mark up my latest tome with all those <font> tags, either. But you don't have to. Today we have Cascading Style Sheets to handle the heavy lifting of making your Web pages look like something.

Most Web sites don't even need HTML tables anymore to be rendered in a modular layout, though that knowledge doesn't seem to penetrate most Internet design teams. (I'll admit, I fall back on using tables when I cannot make CSS-based layout work across browsers, but that's happening less often these days. Even when it does, a working knowledge of CSS really cuts the fat from HTML markup.)

This is your grandfather's HTML: By eliminating the need for design-specific tags and attributes, the HTML standard-bearers have gone back to what the language has been all about from the start: defining the elements of a document for presentation on the Web.

Knowing HTML is understanding document structure: That return to the roots of the language means you can focus your HTML learning on the tags and styles that explain document structure -- paragraphs, lists, headings, sections, images, captions. You know, the content types you work with every day.

HTML logic is quite simple, and the markup quickly makes sense to writers and editors, in particular -- because the language is set up much the way you have to think to put one word in front of another competently.

Not learning HTML perpetuates bad site designs: I've worked with every version of Dreamweaver since 3, and every version of FrontPage since the product was owned by a company named Vermeer.

Yes, these WYSIWYG editors get a little better with each release. But they are still computer programs that have to make guesses to interpret a user's word-processing commands into HTML. Often they miss badly; turning, for example, simple unordered lists into messes of redundant <font> or <span> tags to display what should be the simplest of text formats.

If a WYSIWYG editor is all you work with, and Microsoft Internet Explorer is the only way you ever check your pages, you may never notice how poorly structured your site documents turn out. And that's too bad because at least a few of your Web visitors will be forced to wrestle with bad markup that blows up in their browsers.

Bother to learn HTML (it's easy, really -- start here), get a good HTML editing program (HomeSite is great on PCs, and BBEdit is the leader for Macs) and you'll quickly see the difference. No more wasted tags. You might even write better, with thoughts of logical document structure in your head.

Site tweaks

I finally got around to adding some scripts to the Small Initiatives site that will make the Web addresses of site documents a little easier to share as links, and easier for search engines to index.

Make no mistake, the changes are little more than PHP and Apache hacks that alter the appearance of URLs linked on site. So if you notice any weird links or badly formed Web addresses, I hope you will let me know.