Episode: 3437
Title: HPR3437: The HTML document format
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3437/hpr3437.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 23:23:36

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3437-420, the 5th of October 2021.
Today's show is entitled, The HTML Document Format.
It is hosted by Daniel Person and is about seven minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, talking about my favorite document format.
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Hello Hacker's and welcome to another podcast, Daniel Person here,
and today I'm going to answer a question from Clat 2.
He actually talked about his favorite document format
and what the power was behind that and also reached out and asked us,
what do we like in our document formats and I would like to talk a little bit
about a lot of different formats but the power in using them.
So if you have a web page, you can create that web page in so many different ways.
But I would say that the most powerful way you can do that is using the power of HTML,
CSS and JavaScript as they were intended in order to create your web page.
And if you want, you can have a backend that produces the HTML for you
and create some really nice web page for you.
But the power behind having a pure HTML document with everything that entails
is something that you need to keep in mind when you're doing web development.
Because every website will have some sort of HTML document,
however you render it, but the power of the HTML pure document
where you don't use, for instance, React or Angular to create a lot of divs everywhere
is really special.
Because in the HTML document and the standard that the V3C organization has created is
something that both have the normal user in mind.
And it also has a lot of good accessibility features in it.
So if you create a button in a HTML, however you style it, it will be accessible.
It will be something that everyone can use.
And if you're good with using tab stops and so on and how you structure your document,
you can have something that is really usable for everyone.
If you are thinking a lot about how you are using your headers,
it will be a lot more readable.
And there is so many good tags in an HTML document that could help you out
in order to both keep it very readable and keep it very usable for everyone.
And in the HTML document, you can put some JavaScript,
you can put some CSS and have good styling so it looks nice and have some good functionality
that you put into the document to make it more reactive.
And you can of course put them in separate files if that is needed.
In some cases you don't really need that.
You can put it right in the document and have a small website that has great functionality
and is just one file.
But if it makes sense to split it out in multiple files and have styling in one file or
multiple files and have your functionality in one file or multiple files, that's just fine and
really good way of creating your software but keep the HTML document there in a good structure.
If everything has one element, the web browser doesn't really add an extra functionality
to that document or structure to that document because it doesn't really have the metadata to do so.
But if you are using the right HTML documents in a structured and good way,
the web browser can help you out, the screen readers can help you out and make your document
readable for everyone. So this was what I wanted to talk about today.
My favorite document format is the HTML document because it's a really thought through
and it has gone through soon five iterations and it has a lot of functionality and a lot of
thought behind it. If you are a found of any other document format, please create a podcast.
We can listen about it and I hope that you learned something today. I hope that you liked this
and if you want to comment on it, you can leave a comment as well and I will read those
and I hope that you use more open source.
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