Aging & Wisdom Quote by Mike Davidson

“Old school HTML” lands like a sigh from the trenches: not a romantic nod to the web’s scrappy origins, but an admission that the craft has moved on and the tooling should, too. Davidson isn’t arguing that HTML is hard in some timeless, purist way. He’s marking a cultural shift in what “writing for the web” feels like. The key move is the slide from “never very much fun” to “downright tedious.” Fun is optional; tedium is a productivity tax. He’s reframing hand-coded markup as needless friction, the kind that makes people resent the work rather than respect the medium.

The “for most people” clause is doing quiet politics. It acknowledges the diehards who still enjoy raw HTML while asserting that the center of gravity has shifted to everyone else: writers, editors, designers, and everyday publishers who want to ship ideas, not wrestle angle brackets. It’s an argument for abstraction, not laziness - for tools that honor the user’s intent (structure, meaning, publishing) instead of forcing them to rehearse the machinery of presentation.

The context is a web maturing out of its artisanal phase. As platforms, CMSes, and WYSIWYG editors proliferate, expectations change: creation should be faster, collaboration-friendly, less error-prone. Davidson’s subtext is pragmatic: when the baseline act of publishing feels tedious, people either stop publishing or they surrender to platforms that make it easy - and that trade has consequences for openness, ownership, and how the web evolves.