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.
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.
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.
Also I often call out my colleagues if they try to put a table in markdown. Markdown is not built for tabular data in most professional settings (i.e., one or two table cell could easily take a whole line of markdown to express). A basic <table><tr><td style="background: red">some number</td></tr></table> goes a long way.
Both. We manually run HTML just fine back in the day.
Most frontend devs have no idea what any of that means. But then it seems everyone who can write 3 lines of code professionally refers to themselves as an ”engineer”.
I did not go to a front end high school.
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.
CSS, on the other hand...
No, we've been generating it with templates or authoring templates.
Authoring HTML by hand is a very early 2000s thing to do.
You add “include” tags to your HTML file and your web server like nginx or varnish would replace it with the fragment at runtime.
<!--#include virtual="../footer.html" -->
Very cheap, stable, and very big changes across the whole website could be done instantly since cache invalidation is trivial (the web server knows all modified dates of all fragments).
Also, no additional CDN or caching needed. Later, with CDNs there was even a variant where these fragments were hosted at the edge (ESI).
Yesterday. Astro components.
3 million people will have seen it as I type this. More next week.