Ok, looking at HTML 5 doctor, a view-source reveals such a train wreck of bloated, incompetent…

3 min readJan 12, 2022

Ok, looking at HTML 5 doctor, a view-source reveals such a train wreck of bloated, incompetent, non-semantic turdpress garbage, I wouldn't trust them for anything either. It's a crappy broken off the shelf turdpress install.

This ALONE:

<body class="home blog" id="com-html5doctor">
<header role="banner">
    <div class="inner group">
    <a href="http://html5doctor.com" rel="home"><div>
        <div class="logo">
        <h1>HTML5 Doctor</h1>
        <h2>Helping you implement HTML5 today</h2>
        </div><!-- end logo -->
    </div></a><!-- wrapper div for Firefox 3.x ref: http://01i.jp/html5bll --><ul id="menu-top-nav" class="semantic-list"><li id="menu-item-3272" class="menu-item menu-item-type-post_type menu-item-object-page menu-item-home menu-item-3272"><a href="http://html5doctor.com/about/">About</a></li>
<li id="menu-item-3275" class="menu-item menu-item-type-custom menu-item-object-custom menu-item-3275"><a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/html5doctor">RSS</a></li>
<li id="menu-item-3276" class="menu-item menu-item-type-custom menu-item-object-custom menu-item-3276"><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/HTML5DoctorComments">Comments RSS</a></li>
<li id="menu-item-3253" class="menu-item menu-item-type-custom menu-item-object-custom menu-item-has-children menu-item-3253"><a href="#">Doctor Network</a>
<ul class="sub-menu">
  <li id="menu-item-3273" class="menu-item menu-item-type-custom menu-item-object-custom menu-item-3273"><a href="http://html5gallery.com">HTML5 Gallery</a></li>
  <li id="menu-item-3580" class="menu-item menu-item-type-custom menu-item-object-custom menu-item-3580"><a href="http://docteurhtml5.com/html5/">Docteur HTML5</a></li>
  <li id="menu-item-3973" class="menu-item menu-item-type-custom menu-item-object-custom menu-item-3973"><a href="https://github.com/html5doctor/">HTML5 Doctor on Github</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>      <!-- end #top-nav -->
    
    <nav>
    <ul id="menu-main_nav" class=""><li id="menu-item-3297" class="menu-item menu-item-type-custom menu-item-object-custom current-menu-item current_page_item menu-item-3297"><a href="/">Home</a></li>
<li id="menu-item-3250" class="menu-item menu-item-type-post_type menu-item-object-page menu-item-3250"><a href="http://html5doctor.com/article-archive/">Article Archive</a></li>
<li id="menu-item-3291" class="menu-item menu-item-type-post_type menu-item-object-page menu-item-3291"><a href="http://html5doctor.com/element-index/">Element Index</a></li>
<li id="menu-item-3968" class="menu-item menu-item-type-post_type menu-item-object-page menu-item-3968"><a href="http://html5doctor.com/resources/">Resources</a></li>
</ul>     <!-- end ul -->
      <ul>
        <li><form id="search-form" action="/search/" role="search"  method="get">
    <div>
    <input type="text" name="q" value="" />
    <input type="submit" id="search-button" value="Search" />
    </div>
</form>
</li>
      </ul>
      <!-- end ul --> 
    </nav>
    <!-- end nav -->
  </div>
  <!-- end .inner -->
</header>

Is reason enough NOT to trust them. How is "Helping you implement HTML 5 today" the start of a new major subsection of the page? That’s the same broken nonsense that the WhatWG used to create their garbage — and thankfully deprecated — HGROUP tag! What's with all the DIV for nothing? Why waste time putting the anchor around it where it can behave improperly (as per their own comment about FF). Even their comments are hurr-durrz. Really, </ul> needs a comment saying we’re ending the UL?

It's hardly a shock their document outline is the typical turdpress gibberish.

One missing heading when they jump to a H3, multiple H1 confusing the piss out of non-visual navigation, anchors blindly dumped in with no block structure behaving as a run-on sentence (since anchor implies no meaning to the content it wraps)... hell are "HTML 5 Gallery", "Sponsors", and " Beginning HTML5 & CSS3" REALLY subsections of "Responsive images – end of year report" 'cause that's how they wrote it structurally. How is “recent comments” a subsection of “Computer says NO to HTML5 document outline”?!?

The first H1+H2 should be a single H1. All the H1 that follow should be H2. The H3 “recent comments” should also be an H2. The element index sections all get dropped to H3, and the H3 at the bottom would all also be H2 since they’re not subsections of the H2 before them! Structurally they would/should be kin to “More posts from HTML 5 Doctor” and NOT subsections of it.

I still say trying to make Turdpress spit out quality markup is what led a friend of mine -- half my age -- to an early grave from neglecting his health.

Accessibility experts you say? Then why is it a broken impossible to navigate mess on my braille reader? What's with the illegible white-on-blue on the main menu/search bar? The broken mix of PX metrics with EM fonts?

Even has the same failing as medium, using serif fonts on screen media. Ok if you're on a HDR/4k display, a middle finger to normal font size users.

Sorry, but I think we have different metrics of who we trust for information.

Written by Jason Knight

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