> Is this typical to construct HTML in Lisp? This feels incredibly verbose and error prone, not to mention confusing and hard to grok. Good luck having a designer mockup/write HTML.

Do you mean that (:td :colspan "2" "username:") is verbose and error-prone compared to <td colspan="2">username:</td>, or what are you comparing it to? That code is probably denser than I would have written it, but I don't see any issue related to the fact the HTML is being generated from Lisp.

This example doesn't take advantage of it, but writing HTML in Lisp is easier and less error-prone than regular HTML, because you can abstract patterns and factor things.