HTML Day and the value of practicing the fundamentals

On August 8th, we celebrated this year’s HTML Day. (Or more accurately, many people around the world did. I tried to put together an event for our local community but failed to garner enough interest from speakers and partners and had to cancel. My failure left a disappointing taste to my mouth and I failed to celebrate the event on my own.)

Tom wrote a post Old Dog Not Understanding HTML Day where he expressed how he doesn’t get the appeal of HTML Day and writing HTML by hand.

As a professional software engineer and sometimes web developer, you’d think I’d be excited about something like HTML Day. But the fact is that I hate hand-writing HTML. I avoid it as much as possible.

Sorry.

Once again I’m in the uncomfortable position of looking at a fun thing people are having fun with and reacting with, “Huh? I don’t get it.”

To a certain extent, I agree with him: I dread the idea of writing a full website without any HTML generating tooling — outside an event like this. I love my Emmet snippets and static site generators so I can define the basic structures and let the machine go brrrrr and build the rest.

I especially agree with Tom’s later remark about using Markdown when writing instead of mixing creative writing and HTML implementation:

I find it vastly easier and more intuitive to creatively write in Markdown than in HTML, when it comes to simple formatting like italics and bold and headings and such.

The bits that I do write, I want to write myself by hand because it gives me greater control to make sure the output is as good, semantic HTML as possible.

Practicing the fundamentals

First, let’s talk about HTML Day (and by extension, Advent of Code he also mentioned).

I think there’s tremendous value in gathering together as a community of practice to learn more about a topic, sharing good ideas and practicing your craft.

Even if we strip out the community benefits and even if you’d mostly generate your HTML by some sort of a tool on your day-to-day basis, I think it’s really good to regularly get back to the basics and practice them. If you’re not a developer who does web frontend, it’s not as important but for anyone who does.

HTML changes over time and it’s good to check what’s up with the standards, new options and best practices. When I started getting into frontend stuff back in my teens, we used iframes and tables to create layouts — now we have flexbox and CSS grid as an example. Smaller things happen all the time as well and taking a moment every now and then to check where you are is good.

Second, even if you generate your code, you need to know and have a feel for the fundamentals so you can judge if the code that was generated is any good.

Tom writes:

There’s that pesky elephant in the room in 2026 again. AI. It’s hard to escape the universal answer to most development questions: I can just get AI to write or check whatever HTML I need so I don’t have to get distracted by troublesome details while I stay focused on the big picture. Laziness, hurray!

The more you use AI to generate your code — in any language — the more you should focus on making sure your fundamentals of the language are good so you can assess the code it gives you.

Our industry is famously quite bad at writing good HTML. Especially with the popularity of React, there are a lot of frontend developers who don’t know the fundamentals and through that lack of knowledge, end up writing inaccessible solutions or having to reinvent the wheel while they could rely on built-in tools in HTML and browsers to make websites and web apps accessible.

I don’t want to write all the HTML in my projects by hand every time. However, I do find a lot of value in regularly doing so to keep up with new advancements in the language as well as honing my fundamental skills.

I also love this quote from Brian Holt:

When I don’t know how my tools work, I tend to resent them because they add complexity to my life.

When I understand what they are doing for me and what I no longer have to do because the tool is doing it for me, I tend to really like my tools.

Sometimes doing things the hard way makes me appreciate the tooling I have so I don’t have to do it every time.