A small archive for people who still believe the web's underlying craft is worth doing well.
This is a site about the unglamorous foundations of the web, written by someone who finds them quietly thrilling. The Elementary Standards is an archive of essays on the things that hold a page together when nobody is looking: markup that means what it says, CSS that ages gracefully, typography that respects the reader's eye, and the standards work that makes any of it possible across a thousand browsers and a billion devices.
The web has never lacked for opinions about frameworks. It has always lacked, a little, for attention to fundamentals. So the beat here is deliberately narrow and deliberately deep: HTML and how it earns its structure, CSS and how it stays maintainable, web standards and the messy human process that produces them, typography as the oldest interface design there is, and SEO understood not as trickery but as the natural reward for building something legible and findable.
The conviction underneath all of it is simple. Craft at the elementary level is not busywork you graduate past. It is the thing that makes everything built on top either solid or precarious.
These essays aim to be clear, a touch opinionated, and occasionally amused. I would rather be useful than exhaustive, and rather be honest about tradeoffs than sell you a silver bullet. Where a specification has a story behind it, I will tell the story, because standards are made by people and the reasoning is usually more instructive than the rule.
Nothing here is scraped, syndicated, or spun. Every article is written fresh, for readers who would rather understand a thing than merely deploy it.
Wander the archive. Start with whatever title makes you curious; the pieces are meant to stand alone. If you leave with one habit sharpened, a cleaner heading hierarchy, a more stable URL, a kinder line of alt text, then this small site has done its job. Welcome, and thank you for caring about the elementary things.