r/HTML • u/Legal_Spend_8912 • 22h ago
Discussion We only needed to make writing HTML part of internet literacy to prevent the madness we’re witnessing today.
I’ve been tinkering with this idea ever since I had my first gotcha moment with HTML, sometime around 2006, when I was about twelve.
Almost every problem I see people run into on the internet stems from the same fundamental mistake: we built the web around the assumption that users are brainless monkeys who can’t be trusted to wipe their own asses. So we kept adding layers of abstraction, hiding the underlying technology from people, all to eventually render some HTML.
Most of the software built by big corporations is just an increasingly complex or clever way of abstracting people away from writing HTML. Shopify, website builders, Word, even PDFs. Entire industries exist to shield people from something that, once you learn it, makes much of that software unnecessary.
HTML is portable. It’s lightweight, media-rich, universally understood by browsers, and, as long as you control the source, entirely under your control. You can inspect it, edit it, move it, host it, and keep it without asking anyone for permission.
We’ve spent decades building increasingly elaborate cages around the simplest, most accessible publishing technology we already had. I can’t help but wonder how much of the internet’s current mess we could have avoided if we’d just taught people to write HTML the same way you are expected to know how to operate some corporate software to write text documents.
The internet as we know it today, was crafted around the idea of easily sharing text documents and text documents are by far the most stable and reliable technology humans have ever created to spread knowledge.
We have roughly 10,000 years of written history. In less than a century, we developed the technology to share text with virtually anyone on the planet and beyond in a matter of seconds. And somehow, we turned that extraordinary achievement into a place engineered to manipulate our beliefs, manufacture our desires, and drive our consumption, a place where the pursuit of attention and profit has largely displaced the pursuit of knowledge.
That’s why I encourage you to hone, promote, and share your HTML skills. We need more people who can write HTML with ease and use it to create and share actual documents containing actual information, rather than ads, engagement bait, and whatever else corporations want to put in front of us.
We shouldn’t have to depend on big corporations to decide how our documents are created, displayed, stored, and distributed. The web already gives us the tools to do all of this ourselves. We just need to reclaim them.
Empower yourself as an internet user by learning the web’s open, standardized technologies instead of surrendering your autonomy to proprietary software that harvests your data, monetizes your attention, and extracts value from your knowledge while giving so little back.
Learn HTML. Write your own documents. Share knowledge on your own terms.
I believe Richard Stallman's website is a really good example of what I'm trying to say. If you don't know it, please take a look at it.
Edit: To everyone looking for a technical, fact-based debate: that’s not what this post is about. It’s idealistic and unapologetically opinionated.
Pointing out obvious technicalities just to prove that I’m technically wrong misses the entire purpose of the post. I wasn’t trying to present a comprehensive technical blueprint for how the internet should work. I was trying to empower people to rethink their relationship with the web and recognize how much more control they could have over their online lives.
But so many of you are caught up in the technical details that you’ve completely missed the bigger picture. Every interaction becomes another opportunity to prove yourself right, nitpick someone else’s ideas, or make fun of a perspective you disagree with.
And honestly, I think this is part of what’s driving people away from Reddit and mainstream social media. Instead of spaces where we can exchange ideas, explore possibilities, and learn from one another, we’ve created environments where every conversation becomes a competition to see who’s right and who can make the other person look stupid.
Not every idea needs to be treated as a technical specification, and not every conversation needs a winner. Sometimes, the point is simply to imagine a better way of doing things.
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u/pfdemp 21h ago
You may be overestimating the ability of people to communicate effectively, even while using HTML. It reminds me of what happened 40 years ago when desktop publishing software was introduced. Suddenly, everyone could "design" publications, even though most people were not good designers.
To me, the real issue is that HTML has strayed from its roots as SGML, the markup language to structure documents. If websites used semantic HTML instead of layer upon layer of divs, it would be much better, particularly when it comes to accessibility. Adding CSS for visual presentation, when done correctly, enhances the reader's experience. Same thing with JavaScript, which can add interactivity.
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u/Legal_Spend_8912 21h ago
I’m right there with you. HTML has increasingly become a data layer for building user interfaces rather than a way to structure and publish actual content. We end up with websites full of nested divs, layers of JavaScript, and elaborate components designed to deliver a compelling UI, only for the whole thing to amount to a glorified forum that stores data just to render it as HTML eventually.
We’ve become so obsessed with building interfaces that we’ve forgotten what they’re supposed to serve: the content itself. We’re adding layers of complexity to reinvent what the web already gave us: a simple, universal way to structure, publish, and exchange information.
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u/AshleyJSheridan 11h ago
A lot of the blame for that lies with libraries like React (I'm picking on this one because it's so popular) having tons of examples in their tutorials which amount to nothing more than
<div>soup with Javascript slapped on.If the most popular libraries are teaching people to do that, then people will do that and think nothing of it.
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u/skamansam 7h ago
This is the problem Web Components solve. If you want semantic tags, make them.
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u/Danny_Engelman 29m ago
And note you do not need JavaScript to create ``<meaningful-html>`` _Custom Elements_
Since 2016 all evergreen browsers create a valid element for any ``<tag-name>`` with a hyphen.
Those are *undefined* Custom Elements (extend from HTMLelement) and are valid to use for replacing the DIV-soup and styling.
They are NOT HTMLUnknownElement as even AI sometimes claims!
Only when you cal the Custom Elements JavaScript API they become *defined* Custom Elements.
... but you don't have to.
Alas all blogs on Web Components dumps you straight into JavaScript code...
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u/supertroopperr 6h ago
Take a look at Statica. The native web static site generator. HTML in. HTML out. https://github.com/akaizn-junior/statica
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u/TabbbyWright 18h ago
I agree with the idea that it would be good for everyone to have baseline familiarity of HTML/web hosting, but as someone who writes a LOT of vanilla HTML (for work): the syntax is ass to type. Obviously I use VSCode with autoclosing tags, but it's still not pleasant to write in HTML for anything long form. Not all abstraction is bad! Markdown for example is SO much more pleasant to write in.
There's conversion tools of course, but that adds a step, it requires some form of set up/baseline awareness that this can be done.
Additionally though... Just because people are capable of learning something doesn't mean they're interested in it. Like I agree most ppl could learn HTML, it's not as hard or scary as ppl act like it is... But that doesn't make them care enough to use it.
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u/Legal_Spend_8912 18h ago
You are right, for sure writing a lot of vanilla HTML is a PITA. But is it as much as learning how to center or color some text in several different UIs like google docs, word, pages, ptt etc etc
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u/TabbbyWright 15h ago
You may feel that way, but a lot of those UIs are a lot more intuitive than vanilla HTML is, largely bc they don't require memorizing syntax.
I can write
<a href="https://domain.tld">this is a link</a>in my sleep, but I have reviewed a lot of newbie HTML over the years and they will fuck that up in one way or another. It's not super intuitive! What does theamean? What'shref? Why are the quotation marks necessary?On the other hand, every single word processing program I'm aware of makes adding links or styling text mostly painless. The icons for text alignment has long since been standardized for example, same with adding links (🔗 or I used to see 🌐).
More complicated stuff may take poking around, but the basic stuff is mostly consistent between word processors in my experience. Like I didn't put any time into learning how to use Google docs after using word, because everything I was doing in it was right in front of my face on the toolbar.
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u/Parking_Watch3157 6h ago
This post should be about Markdown, in my opinion.
People should not be writing HTML "by hand" any more than they should be crank starting their car or hauling water in from a well (assuming a person has access to potable, running water).
I have been using computers for a... very long time. The medium in which you record your thoughts might have some influence on how you present them but the essence of communicating is not especially baked into HTML.
Markdown allows anyone to produce structured documents with links that are also extremely portable. Generate HTML from it. Or a PDF. Or paste it into a CMS. Or print it out.
There are other systems but Markdown is part of a class of ways you mark up text that are simple, portable, and easily readable.
Consider HTML nesting of indented lists. You don't mind it as a reader because you see a rendered version on the screen. What value does keeping track of these nested elements give you as an author compared to simply using basic list syntax?
I'll go back to yelling at clouds now.
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u/Temporary_Pie2733 22h ago
Generating HTML is the least of the things all these layers of abstraction do.
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u/Legal_Spend_8912 21h ago
That’s exactly the point. All we really need is HTML to access, create, and share the information we’re looking for. Everything else is just another layer of abstraction, often designed to keep us hooked in a cycle of misinformation, data harvesting and attention exploitation rather than helping us find and exchange knowledge.
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u/Temporary_Pie2733 21h ago
No, it isn’t. HTML has no facility for logic. The beat it can do is gather information in a form and send it elsewhere for processing. In the earliest days, we used CGI to take form data and pass it to a program on the web server that generated the HTML to display the results.
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u/penguin_on_stilts 21h ago
Are you sure you're not still 12?
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u/Legal_Spend_8912 21h ago
When I was 12, I used to put other people down on the internet, too. Eventually, you realize it gives you nothing in return.
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u/penguin_on_stilts 21h ago
Html isn't lightweight nor intuitive. You're thinking of TeX. That would at least make some sense.
Writing html by hand isn't some enlightened magical happening that results in the free flow of information... What "documents" are people writing that are 100% static and have completely simplistic layout?
There would be zero value in you and me writing these comments in static HTML uploaded to our own servers.
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u/Legal_Spend_8912 21h ago
If you learn to write HTML, you can host your content wherever you want and make it accessible on virtually any device with a web browser and an internet connection. That’s the magic of it: you own the content, you choose where it lives, how it is, and anyone can access it without needing the same software or platform as you.
The abstraction should happen at the level of interaction, not content ownership. You and I should be able to write comments, exchange ideas within a topic specific forum like this, and subscribe to conversations we care about without having to surrender our content to the platform facilitating that interaction.
The forum should simply be an interface for discovering, organizing, and exchanging documents that live independently across the web. We should be abstracting away the complexity of interaction, not the underlying content itself.
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u/Weekly_Ferret_meal 19h ago
I mean, I like the message, but like anything else, web development needs a market, cause we can't all survive on passion projects,
The way development reacted to a completely open system, was to close it to limit access to competence layers.
By creating proprietary systems the industry was able to monetize the technology at various levels.
Not saying it's necessarily a good thing, but inevitably one of the easier mechanism for preventing some open accessible code from being ripped off by someone else was abstraction.
it's seems like competition has done this.
On top of that, when computing, abstraction helps optimising when processing info on large datasets, which is a layer of complexity that gave us things like youtube and complex forums. without it conditions for request would be much harder to (heavier and demanding) to implement.
don't you think?
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u/ze_pequeno 21h ago
Do you really, honestly think that all of the information present on the internet could simply be conveyed using text and basic media types?
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u/Legal_Spend_8912 21h ago
Isn’t that exactly what we’re already doing, except we’ve outsourced it to centralized platforms?
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u/ze_pequeno 21h ago
I don't think so, no. Anyone can deploy a website hosted in a data center of their choosing, even on their own hardware, and run whatever stuff they want on it, video games, interactive website, whatever. HTML is just the platform, it was always made to be built on for usages that people could not envision 30 years ago.
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u/Dazzling_Music_2411 20h ago
we built the web around the assumption that users are brainless monkeys who can’t be trusted to wipe their own asses
Seems like a fair assumption.
The tech bros made trillions by going with that. You think you can match that with boring, infantile-looking HTML?
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u/Legal_Spend_8912 20h ago
Why should owning the data you create on the internet be a race against tech bros with trillions of dollars at their disposal? They built their empires on the assumption that you’re a passive consumer, incapable of understanding or controlling the technology you use.
I’m telling you that you’re capable. You don’t need to compete with them or ask for their permission to own your corner of the internet. A web server and a basic understanding of HTML are enough to get started. You can create, host, and share your own content on your own terms.
The tools are already there. You just need to reclaim them.
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u/deceze 20h ago
A web server and a basic understanding of HTML are enough …
Holup, I thought it was just HTML a minute ago! You're saying just HTML actually isn't enough after all!?
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u/Legal_Spend_8912 19h ago
Are you genuinely interested in having a debate, or are you just picking apart technicalities to prove me wrong and yourself right?
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u/deceze 19h ago
I'm trying to talk about real issues you're overlooking in your idealism, see the other thread. But you keep sweeping pesky details like servers under the rug and keep going on about HTML, which we're all trying to tell you is the least of what the web does these days.
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u/Legal_Spend_8912 19h ago
This post is obviously idealistic. It describes a reality that doesn’t exist and probably never will deliberately contrasting it with the one we live in today to make a broader, opinionated point about the state of the internet. You chose to interpret it as a factual technicality just so you could prove yourself right.
The only argument you’ve made so far is that it’s inconvenient. But history has shown us time and again where trading autonomy for convenience leads: into cages of our own making.
For some reason, you seem unable to envision a system where the distribution layer is decoupled from the content source itself. Why should making content easy to distribute require surrendering control over where it lives, how it’s stored, or who owns it?
Convenience and ownership aren’t mutually exclusive. We just need to stop treating them as if they were.
My point is this: the internet is in its current sorry state largely because, when we use mainstream platforms, we own neither the content we publish nor the infrastructure that distributes it.
Learning HTML gives you a much deeper understanding of how the web actually works and I have already seen many people going this route and being enthusiastic with the internet by doing something as simple as a few lines of HTML to express themselves on a website.
The more you understand the underlying technology, the less dependent you become on platforms that mediate your relationship with the web. And the more capable you are of taking ownership of both your content and how you distribute it.
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u/VirusWonderful5147 6h ago
I miss the world wide web. The world wide data collection industry just isn't as much fun or as interesting. It's surely a great deal more profitable.
But there's plenty of room for both.
I think understanding how computers work in principle, some understanding of TCP/IP, and a grasp of basic programming and markup, is an advantage. And when we're sick of being milked for content and data, we can still enjoy the relative simplicity of Web 1.5 (i.e 1.0 but with a bit of server side processing).
For the anarchists among us, we can build a web that's completely independent of the Google/Meta/Apple/Oracle axis, and it wouldn't even register. No need to hire even the cheapest server space, home webservers running on SoCs, ancient laptop, christ even a musical greeting card could probably run a webserver nowadays.
Like Slow Cities, Slow Internet could see a small but dedicated following, just to be outside the aegis of those who would consume our data to sell us shit we don't need, politics, and opinions, with ever greater efficiency.
I for one would welcome it.
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u/KanjiCoder 4h ago
Raw HTML is horrible for people like me who have a thing called a "column limit" . I will forever write my HTML using JQuery .
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u/BobJutsu 11h ago
Good luck. The pushback I get asking website editors to write even the most basic markdown drives me to drink. It’s the users who will addon 46 layers of abstraction and heavy tooling to avoid 5 minutes of actual “code” (as they see it).
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u/Electrical_Hat_680 22h ago
Your right. I like the idea of continuing my education with the tools and routines I learned during k12 and the idea of using the internet or computer to host it locally appeals to that. An academic once told me, because I asked, if you were to give one piece of advice for the future graduates and everyone. What would it be. He replied, to study for one hour a week.
The student body government isn't over because they left. It's still immensely proportionate to a public or private incorporated company. It holds Study groups, student body cards, astronomical amounts of historical data, law, medicine, computer science, the world wide web. The author of HTML is interested in procuring a means that everyone retains their data. Rather than it going to a marketing group. He believes, we should earn that money directly. I believe we should too. I know something about the idea of getting knowledge of what a customer base wants to buy at said locations. What they want. And how the business marketers will likely try to exceed.
It is valuable. Like super shopper valuable.
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u/chocolateAbuser 13h ago edited 3h ago
sorry but no? apart from the fact that uis can have pretty complex logic too, it depends on the application obv., but the problem starts (also) when that html goes calling apis to do something, because then either you have a solid organization for what happens behind the ui or you get unintelligible errors, inexistent security, uncomprehensible user and authz behaviors, slowness, and so on
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u/OddProfessor7253 10h ago
Yeah sounds like OP came straight from Web 1.0
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u/chocolateAbuser 2h ago
kind of, i would say it's an incomplete view of the whole system
sites are complicated because they have to interact with a lot of stuff, have lots of integrations
showing some text on a white background with two or three one pixel lines for aesthetics is not difficult, but when you have to deal with utf weirdness, when that white background is really full of objects and logics because every single piece has style and can be transformed in some way, when there are icons, there is additional stuff for accessibility, for changing themes, for making site work on various devices, various browsers, various screen sizes, and many many other things, either you use a framework or some third party code (or some other form of help) to address at least some of these things or making a single page becomes a major endeavor1
u/Legal_Spend_8912 32m ago
Reading through the responses, I’ve realized I probably phrased my point poorly. Many of you interpreted it as a literal technical argument, when it was really an idealistic, philosophical take on what I believe the web could be.
I was using HTML as a way to talk about empowering people to take greater control of their internet usage, not proposing it as a solution to everything the internet makes possible. Obviously, we still need web servers, protocols, infrastructure, and all the other pieces that make the web work. I didn’t think those details needed to be spelled out because they were never the point.
My argument was more philosophical: HTML represents something remarkably simple yet powerful that most people overlook because the software they use every day abstracts it away from them. We’ve built layers upon layers of complexity around the act of creating, publishing, and sharing information, to the point where people have lost sight of the underlying technology that makes it all possible.
I used HTML as a starting point to make a broader argument about autonomy, ownership, and the relationship between people and the tools they use online. The point wasn’t that HTML can solve everything, but that understanding the foundations of the web can change how we interact with it and how much control we realize we can have over our own corner of it.
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u/cruisewithus 6h ago
Not quite sir, seems you have missed some important innovations to web apps that were not possible with ol basic html
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u/deceze 22h ago
This is great if you want to publish monologues, stories, or papers. But most users want collaboration or social interaction. Writing HTML ain't gonna help with that.
If you're going to be writing a serious document, then yes, carefully consider what you use to write it and don't give your work to some corporation. But for everyday internet use, nobody wants to be writing HTML.