Back in the mid-2000s, nearly everyone I knew relied on a WYSIWYG editor to write their HTML. A depressing number of them were actually using Microsoft Word to write documents, then using the "export to HTML" function to export the worst HTML you've ever seen. Worse: if you tried to argue for semantic HTML or web standards, they'd argue with you for days about how none of that was necessary. Accessibility? Meh. "Not enough of our users care about that," I was told more than once. Separating content from presentation with CSS? "The browsers will never support it," they said. And so a few like-minded friends and I started what I called THE RIGHTEOUS WEB UNDERGROUND. The idea was to keep pushing for simple, accessible, standards-compliant websites--The Righteous Web--even in the face of the designers and the marketers who kept telling us that wasn't necessary. To design our own sites using table-free layout (that was actually a thing--people used to use HTML tables to lay out pages) and to rigorously separate our content from our presentation.
Fast-forward to the late 2010s, and finally--FINALLY--most people who are building the web understand and embrace these concepts. We don't really need an underground anymore. But now we have frameworks and content management systems and templating engines that hide the HTML and CSS where we never have to think about them. For the most part, the HTML they produce really isn't bad. All of the popular ones have adopted HTML5 and CSS3, and if they aren't totally up-to-date all the time... well, it's not really a big deal, because they're usually good enough.
But sometimes you need to know what's going on behind your framework or your CMS. Maybe it's because you just can't get rid of a color you don't like because you can't figure out where it's coming from in the CSS. Maybe it's because your site doesn't meet the accessibility standards that you (or your employer) need it to. Maybe you want to tweak your SEO by using semantic HTML.
The documents in this repo are intended to help you find out how to do that.