Keep up with the standards. And forget the concerns of longevity.

The ever growing agitation among "most" of the Web developers is the long existence of their work. Or for some, lastingness. Or simply existence.

Web Development has come a long way since the late '90s when it started to go mainstream. And in the world of Internet and Web, that era has become an ancient history although it has been just two decades. It started with HTML, the markup language for the web. CSS and JavaScript came along and simple static "word-document" like webpages started becoming wow. Since then, HTML sits at the heart of web. But today’s scenario is different. Frameworks are the pivot of the web today. Developers don’t have to swim and sometimes sink in the ocean of <div>. Building web-pages purely using text-editors are long gone. And yes, now they are required to understand modern technologies that have evolved from HTML, CSS and JavaScript. From CSS preprocessors to ever counting numerous JavaScript libraries and frameworks. And for many reasons HTML, CSS & JavaScript are used much more than they were originally meant to be.

And HTML still sits at the heart of the web.

But there’s a risk. The risk of losing focus. The risk of losing focus on following standards and best practices. The HTML is parsed to create a DOM when a web browser loads a web page. The browser then renders the content to the user. Interactive pages are built by manipulating the same DOM. So if there are issues with HTML or the markup is incorrect, both the web-page’s look and and its functionality may alter or completely break.

Therefore, the difference between an accessible and a usable page and a completely untidy and tangled noodle of <div> … is the time wisely spent on writing quality HTML code and following best standards.

Standards compliant HTML is very likely to last or remain popular for a long time. Also HTML features are rarely deprecated. But frameworks might come and go. And the ever growing agitation among "most" of the Web developers is the long existence of their work. Or for some, lastingness. Or simply existence.

Standards themselves will be the single important consideration in favor of writing more clean HTML. All this has led to the evolution of HTML we knew back in that "ancient era" to HTML5 which focuses highly on what today’s users generally expect on a web-page when they are on the web. And supports a typical web development in clean and readable ways to implement functionalities. But even with so many advanced features, designing pages badly has become much more easier than before and getting sunk in the ocean of <div>. There are numerous solutions that offer modularity on top of web languages to minimize this problem.

But eventually there’s no replacement or a substitute for using time wisely to write HTML code effectively and this practice is very crucial for today’s every modern web developers as it was in for them in those "ancient era".

This article was published by me on Medium on May 1, 2017