HTML-First Web Development and the Power of Basics

I really enjoyed this writeup detailing an engineer’s experience rescuing a broken utility company website. Rather than piling on more client-side frameworks, the author went back to fundamentals with an HTML-first approach—ensuring the application worked reliably with simple, semantic HTML and minimal dependencies.

The impact was immediate and dramatic:

The results? When we launched, the number of people completing the form doubled. The analytics people didn’t even know where these users were coming from. Of course, your javascript-based analytics package doesn’t see the users you are bouncing because of javascript failures. It was a flood!

It’s a great reminder that resilient, accessible web applications often come down to getting the core primitives right before reaching for complex client-side stacks.