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We have been authoring HTML by hand for decades with ease. Text editors are very good at it, and many have commands to auto-wrap, auto-close etc. Reading and wr
by Jakob 5mo ago
We have been authoring HTML by hand for decades with ease. Text editors are very good at it, and many have commands to auto-wrap, auto-close etc. Reading and writing is simple.
- laurels-marts 5mo agoYou have been authoring HTML by hand for decades. Not every SWE is a FE dev.
- AlecBG 5mo agoJava engineers write lots of HTML in java docs:)
- Tomte 5mo agoYes so far, but it‘s switching heavily towards Markdown.
- austin-cheney 5mo agoMost front end devs can’t get HTML right either.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoModern JS/TS devs probably not, but I wouldn't even call someone a "frontend dev" if you don't know HTML, kind of being a infrastructure engineer and not knowing how any OSes work.
- austin-cheney 5mo agoIt’s not just knowing HTML as in writing a bunch div tags and patting yourself on the back. If you aren’t able to achieve at least 80% WCAG AA compliance you can’t write HTML. Most frontend devs have no idea what any of that means. But then it seems everyone who can write 3 lines of code professionally refers to themselves as an ”engineer”.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoYes, it's literally about being able to use HTML effectively and knowing what you are doing, then you know HTML. I'm not sure why you bring up some arbitrary accessibility guidelines, that has no bearing if someone is using HTML correctly and neither would I gatekeep the "frontend" label on some arbitrary "must pass this particular standard", never heard something so outlandish when it comes to who could call themselves frontend developer or not.
- austin-cheney 5mo agoI suspect this unintentionally satisfies my conclusion.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoOnly if you're willfully ignorant of the wider discussion.
- austin-cheney 5mo agoObviously. Me having technical knowledge you appear to not have on the discussion at hand makes me ignorant of the discussion at hand.
- temporallobe 5mo agoThis is shockingly true. Most newer FE devs I have encountered are mostly trained on the popular frameworks and lack understanding of the underlying fundamentals, e.g., they only know TypeScript + SCSS and some smattering of HTML but more often know whatever templating engine and MVC(ish) backend the framework uses. It’s really helpful to understand what the browser is actually doing and all the “stuff” the framework spits out on the other end.
- ffsm8 5mo agoPeople have been authoring html by hand for a long time before the specialization to Frontend dev even existed...
- F7F7F7 5mo agoI learned HTML 20+ years ago in high school. I did not go to a front end high school.
- antonvs 5mo agoYour high school taught you a front-end markup format. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea to someone at the time.
- graemep 5mo agoSimple HTML is easy to do. If you just want a document with information and it does not need lots of branding and great aesthetics. That is what you are looking at as an alternative to Markdown.
- radicalbyte 5mo agoYou don't have to be a FE dev (which is largely a junior/mid-level position anno 2026) to write HTML. I'm not and I've used it for years. With Markdown being a thing that has been less common, sure, but that's more of a zeitgeist thing.
- jameshart 5mo agoHTML was invented for physicists to be able to write papers. It's not something that's beyond anyone without frontend dev experience. CSS, on the other hand...
- pydry 5mo ago>We have been authoring HTML by hand for decades with ease No, we've been generating it with templates or authoring templates. Authoring HTML by hand is a very early 2000s thing to do.
- pbhjpbhj 5mo agoAfter you a FE webdev that doesn't regularly author HTML by hand?
- victorbjorklund 5mo agoHand on heart. When was the last time you built a serious production system for a real business that was 100% built from HTML without using any build step? Just editing the footer and header in every file when it updates (or using iframes)
- coldtea 5mo agoLLMs aside, when was the last time you wrote React/JSX and didn't write a subset of HTML by hand in them?
- victorbjorklund 5mo agoThat is the point. No one writes HTML without any abstractions anymore. You use a framework or a build tool. Because just editing pure html files is a pain in the ass. Probably haven’t done that since 2010.
- Jakob 5mo agoMaybe not in your corner of the internet, but businesses used server side includes (SSI) for that, not iframes. You add “include” tags to your HTML file and your web server like nginx or varnish would replace it with the fragment at runtime. <!--#include virtual="../footer.html" --> I saw this was quite popular for big publishing houses with millions of articles still relatively recently 10 years ago. They would only write the HTML body of a new article and the other fragments would be included by the web server. Very cheap, stable, and very big changes across the whole website could be done instantly since cache invalidation is trivial (the web server knows all modified dates of all fragments). Also, no additional CDN or caching needed. Later, with CDNs there was even a variant where these fragments were hosted at the edge (ESI).
- OJFord 5mo agoTemplated though, not manually writing it out for every blog post say. I think GP means it just has more friction as a writing format than markdown for example.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoNo, literally manually typing out HTML tags and everything. Many of us did it so much things like Emmet (https://emmet.io/ https://emmet.io/) were invented and used so we could hammer out full HTML documents even faster. Even after React became popular, people are still manually typing out HTML elements, although they call it "JSX" instead, but in reality it's just HTML. My first blog on the internet literally was a bunch of .html files, where my post "template" was the first post copy-pasted when you wanted to make a new post. Changing the design involved changing the same thing across all files.
- cxr 5mo ago> PS: Really cool static site generators that shoot for simplicity don't require you to create extra template files written in a new, made-up template language. When you want to create a new post, you give it (a) the static files from your existing site and (b) the markdown for your new post. The "templating" engine inspects your existing posts (incl. e.g. class attributes) and then copies the same document structure into a new file, except with the right stuff (timestamp, title and heading, post content...) substituted in to the places where it's supposed to go. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30961588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30961588>
- F7F7F7 5mo ago[flagged]
- OJFord 5mo agoWell if you're going to be like that you may as well say something about assembly, butterflies, and what the hell's a web log anyway, spiders and beavers have nothing to do with one another. 'we have been authoring' is present perfect continuous. Going forwards, and for at least the last two 'decades', HTML blog posts can use CMSs.
- temporallobe 5mo agoI can code up a complex HTML table by hand faster than I create a basic MD table, but other than that, I find it difficult to achieve a good writing flow with pure HTML, even with all the automation. I author a lot of API docs, READMEs, and how-to guides, and find MD to provide the perfect mix of decently powerful markup and flexibility with supporting raw HTML when needed. The only constraint is that some markup renderers don’t support or severely restrict HTML passthrough (I ran into this with GitHub recently).
- mohamedkoubaa 5mo agoI did this on an airplane once because I didn't have Internet and I've never felt more like a real hacker since
- phplovesong 5mo agoWhy not just use XML at this point? It has "stricter typing" and can make the spec better.