When I first began learning HTML in 1998 my messy code very easily qualified for the epithet “tag soup.” Quite often I had very little clue what I was doing and very often was copying somebody else’s code and simply changing the content without touching the tags so I wouldn’t “screw anything up.”

As I started to learn more about HTML from online tutorials and books (yes, I learned quite a bit from HTML for Dummies in 1998) I would see it advised that an HTML coder should “indent their code.” But I never saw anywhere an explanation as to what should be indented, what it should be indented in relation to, how much it should be indented, if indentation meant anything more to the logic of the code than just “some lines don’t start at the far left edge,” etc. Still, back then I wasn’t sure if these were even valid or important questions. So I would go through my code and randomly indent some lines then think, “There, my code’s indented. I hope those online tutorials are happy now.” Read the rest of this entry »