A few years ago, I took a class in front-end web development, so the introduction to HTML and CSS was review for me. However, I have not used my training since the course, and I have forgotten a lot. The reading, therefore, was a review of what I once knew, rather than what I know now. The section about the placements of block and float was a traumatic reminder of what I struggled with the first time. This is why people use website builders and CMS software.
As for typography, that is what I love. Typography is both an art form (I’ve taken letterpress classes for God’s sake) and related to the history of the book. I own and refer to the book Typography for Lawyers by Matthew Butterick. It is not only for lawyers, as it offers simply good advice about layout and typography in a text-heavy context. And whatever you do, use smart quotes, and the Oxford comma. I also enjoyed the book Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield. There’s an entire section about why people hate Comic Sans. Oh, I’ve seen the documentary film Helvetica.
While it was drilled into us as junior lawyers that seemingly small spelling or citation errors matter to the reader, content still matters more. Good formatting merely makes it easier for the reader, so that the reader has to do less work to follow your argument. However, mimicking the book on the web is not taking advantage of the medium. Design is important if it conveys professionalism, attention to detail, and keeps your audience engaged.
Digital humanities is almost always a team effort and as such, it may conflict with the individual researcher model embedded in tenure. This need not be so, but universities are slow to change. Moreover, an academic attempting to go it alone may end up taking too much on and being mediocre in both the digital and the humanities. Would digital humanities become a field like bio-chemistry? A mixture of two specialties? Maybe, but biology and chemistry are neighboring spaces, whereas computers and humanities are not. At least not as presently conceived.
I think there might be more interesting digital scholarship in the library, archive, and museum (LAM) community as a result. Within LAM institutions, there is less focus on the individual as creator and more collaborative projects.