According to the 2020 HTTP Archive State of the Web report, a typical web page uses only 25% of available HTML elements. Two of the most common elements in use include the non-semantic div and span, leaving these two web development instructors in a state of despair.
We decided to create a 30-day HTML education course targeted at professional web developers. This course would be delivered by email and feature one or two elements per day. Unlike most HTML education, we instead created a course in HTML vocabulary and accessibility, rather than in HTML coding.
Furthermore, we decided to run the course through email using Substack, an email platform that also creates blog posts. We found email to be a highly effective delivery method for the course materials, as registration was easy, lesson delivery was automated, and developers could work through materials at their own pace.
In this presentation, we reflect on the course, which ran in April 2021. We report on our lessons learned, reflect on our data for the most important topics, and give advice to those who may want to construct their own email-based training materials. Imagine a world where Zoom training is followed up with a series of simple automated email reinforcement of lessons learned for a short period of time. Our methodology would be compatible with university training for many types of supported software, including Microsoft Office, web design platforms like OpenScholar or WordPress, and other applications.