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Comment by inimino | Hacker News Reader

Honestly if you question the overall quality of hand-written HTML (by people who care to hand-write it) with the overall output of tools, I kind of wonder what parallel universe you come from.

I've never yet see anyone argue that the reason tools took over the writing of HTML is because hand-written HTML wasn't good enough.

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When HTML was hand written, it was largely awful. Just like anything people make. Bespoke HTML is now usually nice because the people who care to make it are the type of people who care about that sort of thing.

Hand-written HTML may have had the occasional error but when tools (remember FrontPage and Dreamweaver?) started to be used their output was dramatically worse. This was certainly not controversial at the time. Nowadays with templating languages and frontend frameworks (React is operating on the DOM but it is still just HTML elements in the end) there's still a human picking the elements and attributes that are rendered, even if there is a layer of indirection. So I don't really get the argument that hand-written HTML is bad, especially since it's ubiquitous. HTML was designed with hand-authoring in mind.

> I kind of wonder what parallel universe you come from.

The one where I don't value bespoke development just because it's bespoke?

The universe where I have to actually quantify what's good and what isn't?

The worst kind of comments related to this discussion are always the ones that are insufferably offended that they can't out perform decades of experience and knowledge without doing anything.

>I've never yet see anyone argue that the reason tools took over the writing of HTML is because hand-written HTML wasn't good enough.

Check who you're listening to? It's a fairly common argument.

My position is based on decades of actually looking at HTML, writing it, creating a few web authoring tools along the way, and participating tangentially in HTML5 standardization.

I'm not insufferably offended by what you think I can or can't do (I couldn't care less) I just honestly can't fathom, after 20 years of looking at HTML produced by hand and by tools, how anyone could think the tools produce better markup if you're actually talking about inherent quality of the end result. Cheaper and faster, maybe, with a lower learning curve, sure, but better? I don't buy it.

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