Michelle Barker wrote this nifty piece about blockquotes but then at the end talks about why it’s so important to learn HTML:
Conversely, it’s pretty easy to write bad HTML, because for most developers there are no consequences. If you write some bad Javascript, your application will probably crash and you or your users will get a horrible error message. It’s like a flashing light above your head telling the world you’ve done something bad. At the very least you’ll feel like a prize chump. HTML fails silently. Write bad HTML and maybe it means someone who doesn’t browse the web in exactly the same way as you do doesn’t get access to the information they need. But maybe you still get your pay rise and bonus.
Thanks to Andy Bell’s ever-so-good newsletter, The Index, I found myself ooo-ing and aaa-ing at Michelle Barker’s excellent post from back in May about creating a JavaScript-free menu with the latest bells and whistles like anchor-positioning and the Popover API:
Anchor positioning in CSS enables us to position an element relative to an anchor element anywhere on the page. Prior to this we could only position an element relative to its closest positioned ancestor, which sometimes meant doing some HTML and CSS gymnastics or, more often than not, resorting to Javascript for positioning elements like tooltips or nested submenus.
There’s a lot of good examples in that post that are worth checking out but one thing that stuck out to me was the <menu> HTML element which we can use like this for a series of interactive actions:
<menu>
<li><button>Copy</button></li>
<li><button>Cut</button></li>
<li><button>Paste</button></li>
</menu>
...how have I never used this before!?