Final HTML Assessment

About this assessment

Forty questions covering everything in this path. They are sample questions only: there is no answer key, no marking and nothing to submit.

That is deliberate. The purpose is to show you what you can explain and what you cannot. A question you can answer confidently in your own words is knowledge you have; one where you reach for a search box is a topic to reread.

How to work through it. Write an answer for each in your own words - two or three sentences, not one line. Then verify by building, validating or testing in the browser, and revisit the note in this path that covers anything you got wrong.

Allow ninety minutes for a first pass.

Section 1: Document structure and elements

1. What does the doctype actually do, and what changes if you omit it?
2. Explain the difference between a tag, an element and an attribute, using one example.
3. What is a void element? Name four, and explain why they take no closing tag.
4. Why must <meta charset="utf-8"> appear in the first bytes of the head?
5. What is the difference between block level and inline elements, and what containment rule follows from it?
6. Why does <p><div>text</div></p> not produce the DOM you wrote? Describe what the parser builds.
7. What is a boolean attribute? Explain what required="false" does and why.
8. Why must an id be unique, and name three things that break when it is not.

Section 2: Text, links and media

9. How do you decide which heading level to use, and why is that decision not about size?
10. Explain the difference between strong and b, and between em and i.
11. Why does HTML collapse whitespace, and name two ways to preserve it when it is content.
12. Given a page at /blog/2026/rain.html, write links to three different locations using relative paths, and explain each.
13. What makes link text good or bad? Give one example of each and explain who is affected.
14. Explain the difference between a missing alt attribute and alt="".
15. You are writing alt text for a photograph of a queue outside an office. How would it differ in an article about waiting times versus an article about the building?
16. Why do width and height attributes on an image matter even when CSS controls the display size?
17. Explain srcset and sizes. Why is sizes required rather than inferred?
18. When should you reach for picture rather than srcset alone?

Section 3: Tables and forms

19. What is the real difference between th and td, and what does a screen reader do with it?
20. Explain the column arithmetic that colspan and rowspan impose on every row of a table.
21. When is scope sufficient, and when do you need headers and id instead?
22. Name three things that break when a form control has an id but no name.
23. Explain what the browser collects and sends when a form is submitted.
24. What does an unchecked checkbox submit, and how do you guarantee a value always arrives?
25. What groups radio buttons into one choice, and how many tab stops does the group occupy?
26. Why is type="number" the wrong choice for a phone number or a postal code?
27. Explain why a placeholder is not a label, naming two groups of readers affected.
28. When is GET the correct form method, and when is POST required? Give the underlying principle, not just examples.
29. Why is client side validation never a security control? What must the server do?
30. Explain the difference between styling :invalid and :user-invalid.

Section 4: Semantics and accessibility

31. Two pages look identical, one built from div elements and one from semantic elements. Name four concrete things the second can do that the first cannot.
32. Give the test that decides between article, section and aside.
33. Explain the naming order a browser uses to compute an accessible name.
34. What is the first rule of ARIA, and why does role="button" on a div not make it a button?
35. Explain the three values of tabindex and when each is appropriate.
36. Why is removing a focus outline a serious problem, and what is the correct alternative?
37. Name four ways to hide an element and explain which of them leave it focusable.

Section 5: SEO and performance

38. A page is blocked in robots.txt and carries a noindex tag. What actually happens, and why is this the wrong way to remove a page from search?
39. Explain what a canonical tag does, why it must be absolute, and what goes wrong if every page canonicalises to the home page.
40. Name the three Core Web Vitals, what each measures, and one markup change that improves each.

How to use your results

A harder second pass

Once you can answer all forty, try this: for each question, explain your answer to someone who does not write HTML. The questions you cannot explain simply are the ones you understand least well, regardless of whether you got them right.

Practice

1. Answer all forty in writing, without looking anything up.
2. Verify every answer in the browser or in the specification.
3. List the five topics you were weakest on and reread those notes.
4. Repeat the assessment a week later and compare.