Bureaucracy isn't the only reason to care about, or have to modify, HTML. Things like accessibility and browser compatiblity matter too, and that ground is cons

Bureaucracy isn't the only reason to care about, or have to modify, HTML. Things like accessibility and browser compatiblity matter too, and that ground is constantly shifting. Beyond that, there aren't a whole lot of people outside the world of hackers and scientists who don't care about aesthetics. That means that the overwhelming majority of us will end up working for people who care how stuff looks, even at the prototype stage. That's not bureaucracy, it's human nature. Every time I've let somebody else's tools write HTML for me, it's caused me grief. Either because the tool author had an agenda that was at odds with my needs (Microsoft), because of bugs in the tool (everyone), or because the problem set shifted since the tool was written as browsers and techniques changed (everyone). Likewise, I'm wary of entertwining HTML output with the rest of the program the way Arc does because it makes it too much work to change things down the line. It would be interesting to write a templating system that separates HTML output without making Arc programs take much longer to write. I suspect that it could be done, but it's not entirely clear to me what shape it would take. If done right it would give users the option to leverage Arc's existing HTML output functions where desired. I'll have to play with it.