My Dearest HTML,
Shall I compare thee to another Markup language? Thou art more foundational and more essential to how we consume web content!
HTML, oh HTML! You introduced me to programming, as you do for so many others in the infancy of their coding journeys, and it was through you that I fell in love with web development. In my naïveté, I saw you only as a stepping stone to “true programming”, and rushed past you to spend more time with sexier seemingly more exciting languages. What a fool I was to take you for granted for all of those years! How could I have ignored your blossoming semantic significance at the time that we first met? There have been many iterations of you over the years, and with each pruning of your deprecated elements and each blooming of your newly added tags, so too has your linguistic value grown.
The more I know of you, the more I learn to appreciate all that you convey, from your main root all the way down to your 29 inline text tags. No longer will I abuse your <div> when you clearly provide so many semantically preferable alternatives. With your syntax so simple and straight forward, and your one hundred and eleven(!!!) eloquent elements that are rich with meaning for screen readers and other assistive technologies, you are the key to Web Accessibility, thus also the key to my own heart.
How can I express to you my gratitude for your six metadata tags, that allow me to make pages interactive, informative to web crawlers, and aesthetically pleasing?! Within your glorious <body>, you permit me to navigate a well structured map of words and ideas, tabular data, embedded multimedia, and accessible forms. Your countless attributes empower me to further configure your functionality, style and meaning; a testament to your unwavering dedication to portraying the content of a site to everyone, regardless of their abilities or of the technologies they use.
You are not merely the bones of a site, providing a page’s structure for the CSS skin and the Javascript muscle to work on, oh no - you are so much more! You are the heart of the web - the most essential of organs, and by knowing you so little, I have done the world (wide web) a grave disservice.
Other languages may come and go, but so long as we can code, or the web exists, so long lives the need for all that you have to give.
Yours forever more,
A Besotted Full-stack Developer and UX Designer