Comment by Jakob

6 hours ago

We have been authoring HTML by hand for decades with ease. Text editors are very good at it, and many have commands to auto-wrap, auto-close etc. Reading and writing is simple.

Templated though, not manually writing it out for every blog post say. I think GP means it just has more friction as a writing format than markdown for example.

  • No, literally manually typing out HTML tags and everything. Many of us did it so much things like Emmet (https://emmet.io/) were invented and used so we could hammer out full HTML documents even faster.

    Even after React became popular, people are still manually typing out HTML elements, although they call it "JSX" instead, but in reality it's just HTML.

    My first blog on the internet literally was a bunch of .html files, where my post "template" was the first post copy-pasted when you wanted to make a new post. Changing the design involved changing the same thing across all files.

You have been authoring HTML by hand for decades. Not every SWE is a FE dev.

  • People have been authoring html by hand for a long time before the specialization to Frontend dev even existed...

  • Most front end devs can’t get HTML right either.

    • Modern JS/TS devs probably not, but I wouldn't even call someone a "frontend dev" if you don't know HTML, kind of being a infrastructure engineer and not knowing how any OSes work.

>We have been authoring HTML by hand for decades with ease

No, we've been generating it with templates or authoring templates.

Authoring HTML by hand is a very early 2000s thing to do.

  • After you a FE webdev that doesn't regularly author HTML by hand?

    • Hand on heart. When was the last time you built a serious production system for a real business that was 100% built from HTML without using any build step? Just editing the footer and header in every file when it updates (or using iframes)

    • Can’t answer the person who responded to you but:

      Yesterday. Astro components.

      3 million people will have seen it as I type this. More next week.