HTML First

As a multi-decade-long frontend developer, I have a lot of sympathy with the values of HTML First. This definitely feels aspirational for most web applications of significant complexity, but that might not always be true! Frontend developers should, at the very least, always be thinking about how to leverage the browser and the built-in language features, even if the ideas here aren’t totally realistic for everyone.

But also, I don’t think I can let this go:

The main goal of HTML First is to substantially widen the pool of people who can work on web software codebases. This is good from an individual perspective because it allows a greater number of people to become web programmers, to build great web software, and increase their income.

I’m… not so sure this holds up in the post-LLM era. Simply knowing how to write HTML might already be a skill that’s less valuable than knowing how to write a prompt that generates HTML.