What is HTML?
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the building blocks of the majority of the worlds websites. Although HTML is a seemingly easy language to learn, it is not a trivial matter to be become knowledgable, a great many websites are written in outdated HTML any are not well tested across the most popular browsers.
Although HTML has now effectively been superceded in many ways by XHTML (XHTML 1.0 is a reformulation of HTML 4.01 in XML) a huge number of HTML driven websites still exist and are likely to continue existing for the foreseeable future.
Good HTML and Bad HTML?
As mentioned previously, HTML can be easy to learn, in fact, it is quite possible to write your first HTML page in only a matter of minutes after taking an online tutorial. At the same time the best HTML developers will have taken a great deal of time to learn about all that HTML and it's associated development can offer, including;
- Different versions of HTML
- Deprecated elements
- CSS control
- Table-less design
- Browser compatibility
- Doc type declarations
- Meta tags
- Indexing
- Frames and Iframes
- Accessibility Issues, including text sizing, Alt tags, AccessKeys and table titles.
Why does this matter?
That's a very good question, and the answer depends entirely on the website's intended usage. If you're building the site to show your family on the other side of the world some photos you took of your cat, then it probably doesn't matter too much as long as your intended visitors can see the photos.
On the other hand, if you're building a website to do business, then the last thing on earth you'd want to do, is build a non-compliant, non-validated website. If your business website only supports MSIE browsers, then effectively you could be turning away 10% of your visitors! Imagine doing this in the real world, closing the door in front of every tenth person who visits you! Worse still, if you're offering a service and you're purposefully trying to cater for the disabled, a badly built site can be doing more harm than good.