> My big concern is at the bottom of that technology pyramid. The lowest common denominator of the Web. The foundation. The rhythm section. The ladyfingers in the Web trifle. It’s the HTML.
This is perhaps an annoying pedantic answer, but I feel like this discounts what HTML actually represents, and what the Javascript libraries operate on, which is the DOM, bypassing HTML syntax often completely. The HTML, fundamentally is a representation of this Document Object Model, and if we're to be essentialist, HTML's success relies on good fundamental ideas of what kind of document it generates.
I do, however absolutely agree that the semantic representation of a document is important, and HTML's ideas of what a good representation of a document looks like really do shape the success of the web. This is why in very successful frameworks like React for example go so far as to implement their own pseudo-HTML transpiler that turns HTML-like representations of DOM nodes into DOM construction calls.
That said, I think there is a certain kind of essentiallism echoed in this post that goes along the lines of 'everything can't just be <div>s with classes' and I agree with that, but I don't think it has to do with writing more HTML-like DOM trees as much as augmenting the DOM to integrate more modern representations of DOM operation. I hope that in the future, systems like React leverage something similar to Custom Elements to truly represent their functionality in the DOM tree, as God intended ;)
This is perhaps an annoying pedantic answer, but I feel like this discounts what HTML actually represents, and what the Javascript libraries operate on, which is the DOM, bypassing HTML syntax often completely. The HTML, fundamentally is a representation of this Document Object Model, and if we're to be essentialist, HTML's success relies on good fundamental ideas of what kind of document it generates.
I do, however absolutely agree that the semantic representation of a document is important, and HTML's ideas of what a good representation of a document looks like really do shape the success of the web. This is why in very successful frameworks like React for example go so far as to implement their own pseudo-HTML transpiler that turns HTML-like representations of DOM nodes into DOM construction calls.
That said, I think there is a certain kind of essentiallism echoed in this post that goes along the lines of 'everything can't just be <div>s with classes' and I agree with that, but I don't think it has to do with writing more HTML-like DOM trees as much as augmenting the DOM to integrate more modern representations of DOM operation. I hope that in the future, systems like React leverage something similar to Custom Elements to truly represent their functionality in the DOM tree, as God intended ;)