The thing of it is, the next person that looks at the site might not know PHP... then what? You must know HTML to be able to work with a webpage. Anything els

The thing of it is, the next person that looks at the site might not know PHP... then what? You must know HTML to be able to work with a webpage. Anything else is just a further restriction on who can edit the site. Most small businesses get their websites managed by whoever happens to come along with a tiny bit of knowledge. The tiny bit of copy and paste you might need to do to avoid non-HTML is a perfectly good tradeoff to keep the barrier of entry as low as possible for the next poor schmuck who has to go in there and twiddle with things.