The misleading title of the article is equivelent to making statements like: "If you're driving manual transmission cars instead of auto, you're doing it wrong"

The misleading title of the article is equivelent to making statements like: "If you're driving manual transmission cars instead of auto, you're doing it wrong" or "If you're eating food that needs to be prepared before eaten, you're doing it wrong" I don't see any problem hand-writing HTML at all, in-fact you get to a point in your development career when you can type sufficiently fast enough to beat out even some of the best auto completion functionality an IDE or third-party library/plugin can offer. Zen Coding definitely has its uses, but I don't really remember the last time I had to hand-write much HTML at all anyway. I use the HTML5 boilerplate as a basis for my projects, if using Wordpress I use a barebones Wordpress theme or if I am developing a HTML newsletter I'll use the HTML email boilerplate.