Author doesn’t have real answers as to why people have been using strings for so long, but (as author almost speculates) it’s possibly just because the people w

Author doesn’t have real answers as to why people have been using strings for so long, but (as author almost speculates) it’s possibly just because the people who have been programmatically generating HTML the longest had only string functions to work with in the beginning, and only relatively recently have there been robust, reliable, sufficiently-flexible and sufficiently-capable libraries for generating structured documents any other way. That’s not to mention years of having to cook up hacks to deal with inconsistent browser implementations that violated the document structure you’d be trying to create. In the early 2000s I was working on web projects. We built such data structures, we did XML/XSLT, we were very careful to make sure everything was well-formed… and we still ended up using string templates somewhere. The tools just didn’t always exist to do everything the way we wanted, so we had to work with what we had. It hurt every time we resorted to it, because we knew we’d have to clean it up someday. But sometimes you just have to do what gets you home in time for dinner.