This article is part of my #100DaysOfCode and #100DaysOfBlogging challenge. R1D18

Bruce Lawson gave an outstanding keynote called How to make Loveliness: an HTML Treasure Hunt at the IPC 2019.

He shared that most 2-year-olds can say about 100 words and with 2 ½ years they know close to 300 words.

One of his challenges was to

Learn the semantics of HTML. There are 120(ish) elements, that’s all!

Bruce let us know that using HTML (and CSS) wherever possible, will be

  • more performant
  • more accessible
  • more robust
  • less code to write
  • less code to test
  • more time in the pub / playing CoD / seeing our kids

Well, if that is not motivation enough, I don’t know what is. 😄

Challenge accepted

Today I am reading through the HTML elements, provided by the Mozilla Developer site.

While most elements seem familiar, there are some I’ve never heard of and would read what they could be useful for. For example, <hgroup> as well as many inline text semantics elements or image and multimedia and embedded content elements.

It was surprising to me to see that there is a purpose for both <i> and <em> as well as <b> and <strong>. Back in the day I thought the new elements were deprecating the older ones. That’s not true. Today I learned that

Their new use is to semantically represent styles (or intended presentation), whereas <strong> and <em> represent structure.

See comment by Natan Yellin.

Conclusion

This was a great exercise which I need to repeat.

Further readings