HTML Child

About HTML Child

Every web page carries two lives at once: the one you see and the one you describe. This magazine is about the second one, because it is the one that decides whether the first one works.

Most people meet the web through its surface. You open a page, you see a column of words, a picture, a coloured rectangle that says the word Continue, and you form an impression of the whole thing in about a second. That impression is real, but it is not the page. Underneath it sits something quieter and far more consequential: a description. Someone, at some point, wrote down what each part of that page actually is. This is a heading. This is a list of three items. This is a link that goes elsewhere. This is a control that submits what you typed. The visual surface is assembled from that description, and never the other way around.

That distinction sounds academic until you notice how many different things read the same page. A browser on a laptop reads it. A browser on a phone with a cracked screen reads it. A screen reader, speaking aloud to somebody who is not looking at the screen at all, reads it. A search engine reads it and decides what the page is about. A reading mode strips away everything decorative and keeps what it believes is the article. A device that has not been invented yet will read it too, and it will not have your stylesheet, your fonts or your assumptions. Each of those readers is working from the description, not from your impression of the design.

Before anything is drawn on screen, a browser is handed a description and asked to make sense of it.

The most useful structure on any page is the one nobody has to see to use.

A link takes you somewhere. A control does something. Confusing them confuses everyone.

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