Original, opinionated writing on HTML, CSS, semantics, accessibility and SEO — the craft of building pages that validate today and still work in a decade.
Every article is original, standalone and cross-linked. No cookie walls, no gates, no newsletter tax.
The elements, their meaning, and the parsing rules that make legacy pages keep working.
BrowseThe cascade, resets, image replacement, and the vendor prefixes best left behind.
BrowseConformance, validation, error handling, and the philosophy behind the living standard.
BrowseSemantic markup, information architecture and writing that ranks because it reads.
BrowseEach piece is written to change how you mark up the next page — not to pad a certification.
The right element is the shortest path to an accessible, styleable, findable page. We go element by element so the choice is obvious.
<b> vs <strong>, settled<dfn>Cascade layers, :has() and container queries retired a decade of resets and specificity wars. We show what to keep and what to delete.
Well-formed is not the same as valid, and conformance means two different things depending on who is talking. We untangle it.
“I sent the semantics piece to my whole team. Three sprints later our accessibility audit came back clean for the first time.”
“Finally, a standards reference that reads like a person wrote it. My students actually finish the articles.”
“The cascade article talked me out of a 900-line reset. My CSS is half the size and nothing broke.”
The unglamorous but genuine business case for standards: cheaper maintenance, wider reach, and future you.
A grounded tour of what HTML5 genuinely added to the platform, minus the hype.
A field guide to the mistakes that silently break stylesheets, from unitless lengths to specificity wars nobody meant to start.
Pave the cowpaths, honor the priority of constituencies, choose pragmatism over purity — the values behind the spec.
Marking up inline definitions with dfn and title, and the accessibility caveats that follow.
Skip the tricks; the whole discipline collapses into three lessons that have not changed in twenty years.
Start with the elements, learn the cascade, and never ship tag soup again.
Read the HTML shelf