What Is The HTML Review?

Updated

The HTML Review is an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web. It publishes web-native literary works — poems, essays, webtoons, and interactive pieces — that are meant to be read and experienced in a browser rather than in print. The current edition, issue 05, is dated spring 2026.

What kind of publication it is

The journal's own description is the clearest guide to its scope: "an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web." Two things follow from that phrasing.

  • Annual, not rolling. Issues appear once a year, so the table of contents is a curated collection rather than a feed.
  • Web-native, not digitized print. The works are built for the browser. Some depend on interaction, sound, or motion in ways a printed page could not carry.

The site keeps an Archive and an About page alongside the current issue, so past editions remain reachable from the same place.

What's in issue 05

Issue 05 lists 15 numbered pieces, running from 01 to 15. The entries mix forms deliberately — a single issue can hold a poem, a CSS botany project, a multiplayer music system, and a folktale side by side.

# Title Form Contributor
15 Angel in Latency poem Grace Dignazio
14 carecore CSS botany Raphaël Bastide
13 les aventures de mr mister in the land of lines webtoon zeste le reste
12 Cursor Park place of refuge Christopher Shank
11 Intersymmetric: Connect multiplayer music system James Bradbury, Rian Treanor, and Mark Fell
10 Singing Light interconnected stories Katarina Dorothea Isaksen
09 Kp'ọjọ kp'ọjọ folktale Omayeli Arenyeka
08 Photographic Memory conversation Connie Liu
07 Afterimages artifact of memory Nicci Yin
06 Consumables essay Vinh Mai Nguyễn and Coumbah Sidibé
05 milkfish love letter Helen Shewolfe Tseng
04 Meanders poem Allison Chan
03 from mine to yours inner monologues Queenie Wu
02 Tell umma I'm walking to Baekdusan essay Anne Lee Steele
01 Banner Highway 01: Get on the Fast Lane, 汽车是旅行的工具 banner ad archeology Richard Lewei Huang and Yufeng Zhao

The labels in the "Form" column are the journal's own, and they show how loosely it treats genre. "CSS botany," "banner ad archeology," and "artifact of memory" are not standard literary categories — they describe what the piece does on the web.

How the pieces work in practice

Because the works are web-native, reading them is not always just scrolling. A few examples from the listing show the range:

  • Intersymmetric: Connect is a multiplayer music system, and its entry carries the instruction "Start Audio — Please unmute your device." Expect to grant audio permission and interact rather than passively read.
  • carecore is described as CSS botany, dedicated to caregivers "whether by choice or circumstance" — the visual form is built from stylesheet code.
  • Banner Highway 01 is a browser-based visual poetry series that reimagines classic Burma-Shave roadside advertisement-poems for the Information Superhighway.
  • Cursor Park is framed as "a place of refuge," with the line "Can I sit next to you on the internet?"

The practical takeaway: open pieces in a normal browser with sound available, and give interactive entries a moment to load and respond. Some works will not make sense as static text.

Who it's for

The HTML Review suits readers interested in the overlap of literature and the web as a medium — people who want poems and essays that use the browser as part of their form, not just as a delivery method. If you are looking for a conventional literary magazine in digital form, the interactive and code-driven pieces here will read differently than you expect. If you are looking for work that could only exist online, this is the point of the journal.

To start, the numbered listing on the issue 05 page works as a table of contents; pick any entry and open it directly. The Archive holds earlier issues if you want to see how the journal has developed year to year.