Jason Knight
2 min readJul 18, 2022

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There’s only one place I can really recommend, and that’s MDN. Mozilla Developer Network. Their tutorials and HTML/CSS/JS documentation is first-in-class, head and shoulders above everyone else.

I do not 100% agree with everything they say, but pages like this:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Heading_Elements

… put the chazerei found at scams and web-rot like TutorialsPoint or W3Schools to shame.

The key being keeping in mind that if you’re using HTML to say what things look like, 99% of the time you’re doing it all wrong. HTML and CSS are separate for a reason. Use that to your advantage.

In terms of front-end development the attitude that appearance comes last can greatly speed things up. As your markup should be saying what things are, not what you want them to look like, you can focus on the back end spewing out the content with the proper HTML without caring a whit about appearance. Then you make the layout for screen, then you apply colouration, then you add any presentational images or other affectations.

Because starting out fretting about what things look like for screen users, or taking a ‘screen only” attitude like most of the artists pretending to be designers is utterly bass ackwards, putting the cart before the horse, and more often than not flipping the bird at usability and accessibility, irregardless of how ‘pretty’ it is.

The majority of ‘really pretty” websites are useless crippled trash telling large swaths of users to sod off… and a lot of really ugly sites stand head and shoulders over the “web designer” garbage when it comes to being useful.

It’s what my buddy Dan used to say before he passed: “People visit websites for the content, not the goofy art you hang around it.” The same can be said of applications which exist not to stroke the designer’s …ego, but to perform a task. Most of the artsy-fartsy BS gets in the way of that.

Note, I said “ego”, but I meant something else. But we’ll say “ego’ to keep it polite.

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Jason Knight
Jason Knight

Written by Jason Knight

Accessibility and Efficiency Consultant, Web Developer, Musician, and just general pain in the arse

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