What I learned by re-learning HTML
dannyguo.comIn reading that it doesn't sound like the effort produced a profound improvement in the authors HTML abilities.
One of the first comments made by the author was that he had the bad habit of writing div soups, and after his refresher not only was the author aware of a respectable list of semantic HTML elements and their appropriate usecases but he also was made aware of the importance of using HTML right to handle accessibility.
Sounds to me that it made two profound improvements over the author's HTML abilities.
On the other hand it is admirable that OP turned towards his own ignorance with an attitude of acceptance for the sake of improving his own knowledge. Too many people assume their own expertise and don't return to the fundamentals often enough.
It is. I don't mean to discourage the author in any way. It just doesn't appear, from the article, that the squeeze was worth the juice, in this case.
As someone who also created hobby websites with FrontPage/Dreamweaver/whatever code editor I could find years ago during my schooling days, it was nice reading the tl;dr of how HTML has evolved, and what some of the best practices are now.
Enjoyed the read and I'm always happy to see people put the effort in to understand the Web better. One thing at the end, though: kinda sounds like the author got to a place where they conclude "welp, some stuff like select elements and tables are just too complicated to rely on HTML I guess"... And the thing is that's not 100% wrong, but it misses the larger and more important point of understanding the _role_ of the elements you are using. In essence HTML is just shorthand for a lot of other things you'd have to do (including marking up the correct role). It would have been more fulfilling if instead he reached some epiphany more like: "I realized even when the HTML element doesn't cover 100% of the use case, I realized it's a great place to start reading what other _role_s and aria-descriptions need to be added to that div to make it correct, robust and meaningful"
Cool! Did you have fun with Canvas too?