Comment by Jakob
8 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.
8 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.
I can code up a complex HTML table by hand faster than I create a basic MD table, but other than that, I find it difficult to achieve a good writing flow with pure HTML, even with all the automation. I author a lot of API docs, READMEs, and how-to guides, and find MD to provide the perfect mix of decently powerful markup and flexibility with supporting raw HTML when needed. The only constraint is that some markup renderers don’t support or severely restrict HTML passthrough (I ran into this with GitHub recently).
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.
Basic HTML really isn’t a big step up from Markdown though, and no one was complaining about that. In some instances it’s simpler even. I often forget the exact syntax for a table in Markdown, by comparison <table>, <tr> and <td> are easy to remember. All of the major parts of Markdown are pretty easy, <h1>, <strong>, etc etc. It was written with human authorship in mind.
Typing out <p> for every paragraph is annoying, for sure. But a converter that switches out \r\n\r\n for a new paragraph would be a reasonable middle ground IMO.
>Templated though, not manually writing it out for every blog post say.
Both. We manually run HTML just fine back in the day.
Oh my sweet summer child…
Well if you're going to be like that you may as well say something about assembly, butterflies, and what the hell's a web log anyway, spiders and beavers have nothing to do with one another.
'we have been authoring' is present perfect continuous. Going forwards, and for at least the last two 'decades', HTML blog posts can use CMSs.
That incredibly condescending phrase should be banned from HN.
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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...
Simple HTML is easy to do. If you just want a document with information and it does not need lots of branding and great aesthetics. That is what you are looking at as an alternative to Markdown.
I learned HTML 20+ years ago in high school.
I did not go to a front end high school.
Java engineers write lots of HTML in java docs:)
Yes so far, but it‘s switching heavily towards Markdown.
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.
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You don't have to be a FE dev (which is largely a junior/mid-level position anno 2026) to write HTML.
I'm not and I've used it for years. With Markdown being a thing that has been less common, sure, but that's more of a zeitgeist thing.
>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)
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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.
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