On The Periphery

There are so many web developers that do not know the correct usage of HTML (let alone XHTML). Why???

The answer is pretty straight forward, web development tutorials do not teach HTML. Even worse the authors do not understand HTML; there are plenty of tutorials with incorrect HTML. Thus, new web developers are taught how to program (be it PHP, Ruby or DOTNET) but are not taught the basics.

It’s a quick form of quality assurance for the user. HTML, or now XHTML, is the front door to your application. If you can’t get that right, what’s the rest of your application coded like?

One of the biggest gripes about .NET is that it creates hopeless HTML. Web developers, being taught on .NET, are being shown very poor HTML. Those new web developers, not being aware of the short comings and or different control libraries, are essentially being taught bad HTML by the .NET framework.

Such simple things like using ‘label’ tags, including ‘accesskey’ attributes, and grouping form elements using the ‘fieldset’ tag all add a lot of usability to a form for very little effort. Browsers have, for quite a while now, given users the ability to:

• click on a label to give focus to a field
• use the access key as a shortcut key
• set the tab order

What use is a framework that creates crappy HTML? It makes me wonder, what else about the framework is not up to standard? What other parts of the framework have been compromised for the sake of release?

All new web developers must learn HTML, not just the basics.