Yes, yes, I know it's not the weekend and that's when these posts are supposed to go out, but I was super busy being lazy and didn't even realize it had been two weeks since my last post. It happens. Today I'm (weather permitting) hopping on a plane to attend my first Google I/O and I can't wait to dig more into Gemini at the sessions there. If you're attending, let me know and come say hi!

Self-Closing Tags

HTML has been, for better or worse, pretty fault-tolerant since the beginning. Honestly, this is for the best because, at the end of the day, I'd rather my browser be practical and try its best to show me something than simply give up if there's one error in the document.

In this post, "The case against self-closing tags in HTML", Jake Archibald makes the case against self-closing tags and honestly I 100% agree with him. (Although I've absolutely done it in the past, like, recent past.)

Converting Plain Text to HTML

This is a pretty cool article on Smashing Magazine, "Converting Plain Text To Encoded HTML With Vanilla JavaScript". If you've ever left a comment on a website where your text was 'automatically enhanced', then you've seen an example of taking plain text input and converting to HTML. Sometimes that's as simple as noticing blank lines in input and converting them to paragraphs, sometimes it's more fancy changes like converting *something* to italics (as Markdown does). In this post by Alexis Kypridemos, he discusses the various different ways of doing just this.

Let vs Const - the Final Answer

Finally, here's a great video that aims to give a 'final' answer on whether JavaScript developers should be using let versus const. Honestly, I'm trying to only use let myself, but I definitely will employ const, especially if I'm copying existing code. (Yes, I admit to that.) Anyway, check out the video (and transcript) and let me know what you think: "Let me be"

By the way, even if you don't really care, watch the presentation. It's short and incredibly well done.

One More Thing

Recently I learned about Tina Bell, and early virtually (and virtually unheard of) pioneer of grunge. Her band, "Bam Bam", was active in 1983, before Nirvana and Pearl Jam. You can learn more about her from this news piece below:

And watch a pretty rough SD video below: