HTML Day and the value of practicing the fundamentals

On August 8th, we celebrated this year’s HTML Day. (Or more accurately, many people around the world did. I tried to put together an event for our local community but failed to garner enough interest from speakers and partners and had to cancel. My failure left a disappointing taste to my mouth and I failed to celebrate the event on my own.) Tom wrote a post Old Dog Not Understanding HTML Day where he expressed how he doesn’t get the appeal of HTML Day and writing HTML by hand. As a professional software engineer and sometimes web developer, you’d think I’d be excited about something like HTML Day. But the fact is that I hate hand-writing HTML. I avoid it as much as possible. Sorry. Once again I’m in the uncomfortable position of looking at a fun thing people are having fun with and reacting with, “Huh? I don’t get it.” To a certain extent, I agree with him: I dread the idea of writing a full website without any HTML generating tooling — outside an event like this. I love my Emmet…