It's almost exactly like writing out HTML. The advantages are that you're writing something that your editor and your program can understand. The editor can hig

It's almost exactly like writing out HTML. The advantages are that you're writing something that your editor and your program can understand. The editor can highlight things appropriately, the program can insert or delete html easily since you've encoded it as a standard data structure. Also, you may not have noticed that even though it can handle the data in tuples, if you write it in list form (as in your comment), it's trivial for a program to add extra items enclosed in a particular tag. So if I have: x = ["ul"] I can just append elements to x to fill out the list: for i in range(10): x.append(["li", "Item %s" % i]) However, I don't think that it's _quite_ as painful as writing HTML... You don't have to worry about closing tags, for instance. That said, I really wish Python could deal with barewords in data structures, because that would really clean it up otherwise.