[showell]

It is not a promise, or even a goal, of SHPAML that it will relieve you the burden of understand the final output syntax, whether that is HTML or HTML combined with some template language.

SHPAML users are expected to be literate in both HTML semantics and syntax. The semantics of HTML are not abstracted away at all. The syntax is only abstracted away where it is redundant.

As a couple folks have pointed out, HTML is a pretty simple language. The problem with HTML is not its lack of simplicity; it is its verbosity.

So, if you use SHPAML, you undeniably get the terseness of SHPAML and the powerful semantics of HTML. So the question then comes down to simplicity. Does SHPAML eliminate too much of the simplicity of HTML syntax in trying to achieve terseness?