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I suppose some day I'll have to start writing my HTML to be read by machines, rather than humans. I'm curious how you defend the assertion that you write HT

I suppose some day I'll have to start writing my HTML to be read by machines, rather than humans. I'm curious how you defend the assertion that you write HTML for humans. You write it on a computer, for other computers, with quite a lot of markup that humans are never going to see. For every ten thousand pageloads, how many people do you think are going to hit "view source?" Writing for "other humans" would be something like a document in a WYSIWYG editor, like Word. The comparison to code is even more hilariously in-apt. A parser or a complier ignores the indentation and commenting when producing the final product.

nitrogen 16y ago
I write my code and HTML to be read by a human because: 1. I may need to work on that code or page in the future, 2. Someone else may need to work on that page/code, 3. Some of that code may end up as open source, 4. I'm showing off to the 0.01% of people who view the source. I'd like everything I do to be of educational value to someone, somewhere, even if all they learn is how bad I am at writing compact HTML. If I ever have any high-traffic sites, I'll most likely use a compacting system to shrink properly-indented templates and/or cached output from Ruby on Rails, rather than manually compact the HTML.