Unfinished Thoughts

The Personal Website of William Flake

Failing to Leave Well Enough Alone

Caution: Yet another nerdy, self referential post follows

In building this website, I opted to code everything by hand. In doing so, I've had a lot of mess ups, I've learned a lot about web development, and, most importantly, I've had a blast doing it. Today I am announcing the next phase of my development.

For the past decade, the web has been powered by the 4th version of the Hypertext Markup Language, HTML4. As you may have noticed, the internet neither looks nor acts much like it did at the turn of the century: the web has evolved, but the language used has not kept up.

HTML4 has been good, but it's time to do better. For the past few years, teams of devoted developers have been writing a complete overhaul to the system: HTML5 (catchy name, huh?). I know that most of you will not find the incrementing of version numbers particularly interesting, but as a web developer, it's really awesome.

Why HTML5 Matters

For years, there has been some semantic nature to the tags used to mark up web documents. The <p> tag marks up paragraphs. The <blockquote> tag marks up large blocks of quotation. While I doubt many of you have ever seen these tags, they are invaluable to search engines like Google when figuring out what a page means, to unsighted people reading the internet with screen readers, and a host of others.

HTML5 lets me mark up more of the document in ways that directly helps these users. No longer is navigation considered just an arbitrary place in the document: instead it is readily apparent as a navigation bar. The words that you read have meaning, and with HTML5, the structure of the document is a part of that meaning.

How Does This Affect You?

Over the next few weeks I will be transitioning my pages to this new standard. It's a surprisingly large amount of work, but I quite enjoy doing it. The site may have to come down several times, so expect seemingly random delays. But, in the end, it's gonna be great. I've got some cool ideas for things I can do in conjunction with this project, and hopefully the site will be prettier, faster, easier to use, and updated more often.

Thanks for the patience, support, and reading of posts that are really, truly, uninteresting

Comments

Bruno wrote:

Well, that clears that up. Thanks for the totally boring explanation.

David Flake wrote:

So, does this mean there might be some time gaps in your otherwise steady stream of posts?

William Flake wrote:

@David: No, it will probably actually increase my post count, but it will decrease your opportunities to actually read my brilliant thoughts for a while. It's an odd paradox.

David Flake wrote:

Ahh, sort of a like a tree falling in the forest with nobody allowed into the forest to hear it. Very zen of you.

Mom wrote:

Gagggggggg

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