CodeinWP CodeinWP

Why Developers Should Be Studying HTML5’s Design Principles

Why Developers Should Be Studying HTML5's Design PrinciplesThis is not going to be a long article, but just a quick note about something that all front-end developers should be paying attention to.

If you don’t already know, the W3C has formulated a fairly brief, yet valuable document called HTML Design Principles that outlines exactly what principles have guided and continue to guide the creation and evolution of HTML5 and its related APIs and other technologies.

Topics covered in that document include: compatibility, graceful degradation, reinventing the wheel, paving the cowpaths, priority of constituencies, separation of concerns, avoiding needless complexity, handling errors, and accessibility.

The lessons taught by those principles are not just applicable to developers who code HTML5-based apps; they are applicable in so many areas of software development and related fields.

I believe that all designers and developers can benefit from examining those principles and considering how they have affected HTML5 as a whole, and how those same principles can guide decisions that need to be made in a variety of development projects.

So if you haven’t already done so, do yourself a favour and study that document carefully. It could prove invaluable to your own efforts to create acessible, backwards-compatible applications that are future-proof and use universally-accepted best practices.

6 Responses

  1. Paul Carney says:

    Great points, Louis. Thanks for pinging us on this tidbit of knowledge. – Paul

  2. alex says:

    Thanks for the resource!

  3. Skweekah says:

    Love it. Cheers,
    Skweekah

  4. studiotamba says:

    Helped me a lot thanks for sharing.

  5. simacom says:

    good tips…thank you..

  6. me says:

    Whe will we have inner – outer border in CSS?

Leave a Reply

Comment Rules: Please use a real name or alias. Keywords are not allowed in the "name" field and deep URLs are not allowed in the "Website" field. If you use keywords or deep URLs, your comment or URL will be removed. No foul language, please. Thank you for cooperating.

Markdown in use! Use `backticks` for inline code snippets and triple backticks at start and end for code blocks. You can also indent a code block four spaces. And no need to escape HTML, just type it correctly but make sure it's inside code delimeters (backticks or triple backticks).