Why Developers Should Be Studying HTML5’s Design Principles

This 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.