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by jraph 616 days ago
Well done! I really like how you make people write bare text, publish it and bam, that works, just like this, and how you ease into html.

The text is very well written, straightforward, welcoming, well structured. It seems easy and enjoyable to read.

I believe that putting html in non professional hands is a good goal.

Some feedback:

- About <meta charset="utf-8">, it seems to be introduced quite late. People comfortable with English but wanting to write their website in their own language might be surprised. Or even people with accents in their names (you are putting your name in the title, people will probably try this). You also say that it's for special characters like emojis, but you should probably say it's essential for most languages that are not purely ASCII (event English with words like cliché). Maybe you could introduce that earlier and say that it's there for historical reasons and that without it, you may have issues with characters. To be checked but it might be better to put it before <title>.

- body, head, html tags are mostly useless, except for html because of the lang attribute (accessibility + some browsers incorrectly offering to translate)

- vscode is a bit unfortunate because of the telemetry part, and seems quite heavy and complex for the task. On Windows, notepad++ is a great option. On Linux, any default text editor that's already installed will do. There's always codium, which is code without the bad parts. The intended target doesn't know about the bad parts, so they are installing spyware without knowing.

I didn't know about the aria current page feature, I'll start using this.

2 comments

Don't you actually need to set something in the text editor to save it as UTF-8 in the first place if you are going to put that tag? Wouldn't Notepad for example use UTF-16 by default like the rest of Windows?
You totally need to make sure the encoding is right indeed.
> People comfortable with English but wanting to write their website in their own language might be surprised.

A main complication here is that people don't even know about character encodings, so you can't reasonably expect them to save index.html in UTF-8 in the first place. (For example Windows notepad would use the active code page by default.) I agree that it should be featured prominently if that saving issue can be also addressed.

As of Windows 10 1903 the default encoding for Notepad is UTF-8. I think its reasonable to expect relatively modern systems to default text to UTF-8.