[InclinedPlane]

In this case it's a 78k download, of just text. That adds up over enough users. It adds to page load times, it adds to page rendering times, it adds to bandwidth costs.

And then there are the higher level issues. What happens when you get a bug report about how the page is rendered in a specific browser/OS? Do you want to wade through 1500 lines of html or 100 lines? Which do you think will be easier and faster to fix? Which do you think will be easier to inspect for correctness from the start? What happens when you need to figure out why your page is rendering too slowly? Which is easier to analyze, which is easier to speed up? What happens when you want to change the design? What happens when you want to take the design and use it as a UI for a web-app?

Using a tool that generates such crappy HTML may allow an inexperienced person to create a web page with a decent appearance, and it may even save an experienced designer a few minutes upfront. But over the lifecycle of a project it ends up being an enormous drain. If you're an enthusiastic teen putting up a web page for your mother's knitting circle, it's fantastic! But this is not in any sense a truly professional tool.

[mpclark]

Quite. It all adds up and it's unnecessary. It's not green. It's wasteful. It's not elegant. But I fear it is the way things are going, because I've seen this before -- I used to write games in lovely, pure, beautiful assembly language, then folks started using C etc because it was easier and, hey, hardware like the Amiga could still run the games fast anyway. And then the hardware got to a point where it was all so complicated only a madman would contemplate assembly language...

[coliveira]

I think you are not considering the many websites for which this inefficiency doesn't matter. Sure, if you're write Google's main web page, every extra byte counts. But there are not many web sites where this is even close to be true.

For example, there is no big difference in functionality if the Adobe web site takes a few extra milliseconds to load. Customers just want to buy a product and get out of the way. And Adobe is a big company... This is even more true for their customers, thousands of small websites that just want to publish content as quickly as possible.

[SoftwareMaven]

We aren't talking milliseconds, we are talking seconds to 10s of seconds. At that point, you are risking bounces, which any business-oriented site should fear, even Uncle Bob's Burger Bar.