Everything we have published, grouped by shelf. All original, all free to read.
How HTML5 pared down meta http-equiv, gave us the charset shorthand, and which values still earn their keep.
The unglamorous but genuine business case for standards: cheaper maintenance, wider reach, and future you.
Markup and HTTP are separate layers; knowing where one ends and the other begins saves real debugging pain.
Well-formed means the syntax parses; valid means the vocabulary is right — and the gap between them bites.
"Standards-compliant" means one thing for authors and another for browsers; conflating them starts pointless fights.
The WHATWG revolt, the XHTML dead end, and how HTML became a living standard — the plain-English version.
HTML5's radical commitment to never breaking the billions of pages already out there, and how it pulled it off.
HTML5's quietest revolution wasn't a new tag — it was finally specifying what browsers do when things go wrong.
Every few years someone declares the standards process broken; here's why the doom is usually overstated.
Separating content from presentation, and what <b> and <i> actually mean in a post-CSS, semantic HTML5 world.
Pave the cowpaths, honor the priority of constituencies, choose pragmatism over purity — the values behind the spec.
Applying a reset or normalize strips default styling and, in doing so, exposes the invalid markup you've been hiding.
How a working group learned to write a specification by reading the web instead of imagining it.
For a few bright years we believed strictness would save us; here is what that belief got right.
A grounded tour of what HTML5 genuinely added to the platform, minus the hype.
Why the short doctype switches on standards mode, and the quirks-mode history behind it.
Two serializations, one DOM: what XHTML5 really is and when to reach for it.
A doctype does not certify a document; conformance and the label are two different things.
Marking up inline definitions with dfn and title, and the accessibility caveats that follow.
Separating the genuine platform wins from a decade of HTML5 marketing noise.
The inertia keeping projects on HTML 4, and why moving to the living standard is low-risk.
A practical checklist of the markup mistakes that quietly break pages every single day.
The handful of semantic elements that carry almost every page you will ever build, and why mastering them beats memorising the exotic ones.
Prefixed properties promised an escape hatch for experimental CSS and instead left us maintaining a museum of dead browser quirks.
The clever hacks we once used to swap text for logos were a symptom of a missing feature, and the cure was better markup, not better trickery.
A field guide to the mistakes that silently break stylesheets, from unitless lengths to specificity wars nobody meant to start.