A love letter to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
A Love Letter toHTML, CSS, and JavaScript, a manifesto(?)
If you’ve read any of my other writings you’ve probably guessed my secret shame.
I am not a Real Programmer&tm;.
A Real Programmer&tm; could never take these toy web browsers seriously. The web is just a fad, real programs are compiled in dark terminals and guided by an occult hand. Their inner workings are arcane knowledge, every bit is under the control of these True Illuminates. And so web developers have worked hard to become Real Programmers, cramming all their code into JSX and Typescript files, running builds, generating boilerplate with commandline tools.
That stuff is all well and good, I’ve worked with these modern stacks, but I love HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The True Triumvirate of Web Development. Over the past 30 years this technology has proved itself & has infiltrated all of society, democratizing information sharing. Social Media’s walled gardens promised connection but became an arena for gladiators, the algorithms became a way for sensationalism to run rampant, a more insidious rumor mill than any yellow journalist could’ve imagined.
HTML
On October 29th, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, published a document entitled HTML Tags. The document contained a description of the first 18 HTML tags: <title>, <nextid>, <a>, <isindex>, <plaintext>, <listing>, <p>, <h1>…<h6>, <address>, <hp1>, <hp2>…, <dl>, <dt>, <dd>, <ul>, <li>,<menu> and <dir>. Some how, some way, this dialect of hypertext grew – escaped containment at CERN – and since then has infected the world with this mind virus. Wars have been fought, Flames have been thrown, Businesses, Nations, websites, and browsers have come and gone. But the World Wide Web has stayed the same: a wilderness1. Yes, some have tried to tame this wilderness and create their own silos - but the web always strikes back with personal websites and weird projects.
By now HTML5 has expanded to 108 tags (not counting variants on type or other attibutes or user-defined tags), and incremental version numbers are no more! Long live the living standard!.
These are the bones of the web, the semantic structure that hold together text, connects ideas. By “Semantic” we mean that the structure itself has meaning, separating and combining ideas typographically, visually, and for the visually impaired. If we decorate the semantics structure correctly, we can make the data more useful for machines and more accessible to people.
Javascript
Over the years, many add-ons to HTML have been developed. Java Applets in 1993, Shockwave in 1995, Flash in 1996. All forgotten relics, Javascript won and became the standard.1 It was created in 10 days, copied by Actionscript, and then flipped the industry on it’s head as Node.
What more can I say about Javascript? It’s taken web developers from “Fake Programmers” to “Real Programmers” It’s got it’s own add-ons and incorporations, can be used server-side and to build command-line tools, there are polyfills and plugins to add missing & new functionality to browers, it’s the glue language of the web — it was inspired by Scheme put wound up something more like Perl. One ring, not to rule them all, but to connect them all, any way you want.
If you don’t like Javascript, don’t worry! You don’t have to write your app in Javascript, you can compile plenty of different languages to wasm and then use Javascript to run them on the web!
CSS
Finally, the proverbial lipstick on the pig. Another hard-won battle that moved from aesthetic attributes on HTML elements and into a language of its own, the <font> tag is long gone.
Constantly stuck between a world of print and screen design, over the years it took to create CSS3 it has somehow managed to do both, poorly. It used to be difficult to do things like centering , and 3-column layouts. But now CSS is easier than ever to use, even if the weight of history makes it seem frighteningly large. There are many ways to skin this cat, but things we only dreamed of are now possible - like centering, and 3-column layouts. The old ugly hacks are dead, and new ugly hacks have incredible potential.
The Love
Simple, compact, and easier to write than ever; the core components of the web belong to us all. Large codebases that never stop growing and obscure the source on big mainstream websites, compiled from something not entirely unlike JavaScript, or just the ad-strewn wasteland of our modern online dystopia; but there is still a smaller simpler bespoke internet universe, hidden right below all around these ivory towers, if you know where to look. Simple hand-crafted code, that you yourself can read, learn from, and write yourself. Not limited to the restraints of a platform, raw and unmoderated, pure creativity, where a coder can still be free.