I would agree somewhat with pure textual matter. Incidentally, the one thing where SGML doesn't totally suck, as it was pretty much invented for this. It still

I would agree somewhat with pure textual matter. Incidentally, the one thing where SGML doesn't totally suck, as it was pretty much invented for this. It still has a pretty writing experience if you're going beyond just paragraphs and the occasional emphasis. Take inserting hyperlinks as an example, I've yet to see a UI that makes that easy enough, highlighting text and then invoking a pop up window is often a bit wasteful and harder to automate (e.g. inserting the current selection or the top-most browser's content). At least with a WYSIWYG editor the content won't be littered with a huge blob of computing ephemera, but having the URL hidden also means that you can't just grab it if you want to repeat the link. Now the problem is that modern HTML authoring often isn't about regular text, but about creating some kind of hierarchical structure that serves as the content for some pretty involved navigation or data manipulation histrionics. Which means plenty of elements, plenty of nesting, with comparatively little content. And that runs into all the areas that made XML the horror that it is. In a perfect application of "This is normal now", people are actually quite content with being in this burning room of tags and attributes, as long as the IDE helps creating this mess. JSX, Emmet, templates -- it really reminds me of the early days of Java, where everything was just solved by the IDE or code generation tools (getters/setters, DI etc.).