This article discusses the need for visual documentation of HTML code and provides a free API solution, which converts HTML strings to a PNG screenshot.
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Since its conception in the late 1980s, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) has persisted as a critical element in displaying web pages online. This ubiquitous programming language continues to offer a detailed framework for structuring the content we see and interact with on the web, allowing us to format text and multimedia components in plain-text code, which is simple enough to change when the need arises.
As is the case with nearly all programming languages, HTML has transformed to incorporate dozens of new features over the decades since its introduction, accommodating typical contemporary pressures such as community feedback/critique and the rapid growth of adjacent web development technologies. The results of this transformation are easily visible to us in the output of modern HTML code; for example, the most recent HTML iteration–HTML5, introduced in 2014–offers new, simple elements for embedding video and audio files, as well as much-needed improvements in mobile display and overall mobile functionality.
Of course, new elements and display-quality improvements are not the only reason a website’s HTML code will reliably change over time. Websites are designed and redesigned constantly, likely as much for the sake of innovation as in response to trends originating from user feedback. For example, a website developed in 2014 is likely to have incorporated a variety of contemporary design trends independent of the changes introduced in HTML5 that year. In the years following that project, developers of the website will likely have found themselves reiterating at least a portion of their HTML code numerous times, all the while building towards the inevitable release of HTML6 and the eventual incorporation of its new and improved features.
