>, thus implying that to make "pretty, fancy" web pages you need to complicate the process of creation: [...], people have accepted the use of 15 different too

>, thus implying that to make "pretty, fancy" web pages you need to complicate the process of creation: [...], people have accepted the use of 15 different toolkits I wasn't implying that nor endorsing the use of toolkits to complicate process of creation. Yes, the vast majority of other comments in this thread have focused on overuse of "tools" and "frameworks" but my point was about his first frustration mentioned... the syntax itself becomes more complex to achieve richer (non app) web documents. Yes, the author mentioned "npm" and "react" but his first paragraphs were the exasperation of syntax TABLE "<TD><TR>" to CSS float. Staying with that theme, his subsequent paragraph emphasized the increase complexity of syntactic foundations before accounting for any toolkits and HTML generators: >My point is that the foundations are now sufficiently complicated enough on their own that it seems foolish to go add more optional complexity on top of it. I’ve kept my examples to the most basic of web implementations, and I haven’t touched on Javascript, animation, libraries, frameworks, pre-processors, package managers, automation, testing, or deployment. Whew. My point (which is based on the universal phenomenon of increasing complexity in other document layouts languages such LaTeX, Postscript language, etc,) is that the small and simple HTML example he cited isn't full-featured enough for modern web documents. I learned to code "plain HTML" by hand in 1990s but my beginner's knowledge of a few HTML tags in my brain isn't enough to replicate a Wikipedia page. If I decided to do it, it wouldn't matter if I used Dreamweaver, or used a Javascript static site generator, or typed HTML5+CSS3 by hand in Notepad ... the end result would still be a more complicated set of illegible syntax that continues the exasperation of <TABLE> to CSS flex float. For example, one desirable feature of a modern document (not app) layout would by dynamic resizing of page components depending on big desktop vs tiny smartphone screen. Every example out there to accomplish that (whether multi CSS files, or single CSS file dynamically changed by Javascript) will look more complicated than his "hello world" HTML. For any new feature "X", there's a minimum Kolmogorov complexity to accomplish it which makes the syntax grow in complexity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity