| Picture a WYSIWYG or maybe a preview-below editor, much like the Stack Exchange ones, but outputting HTML behind the scenes rather than markup. Now there's no character to type for italics, you highlight what you want in italics, and push the button. Or type Control-I. <i> and </i> magically appear. Pretty soon, you might even learn what they mean. A "make bullet" or "make numbered" list button. An indent/unindent button. Much like GMail Compose or Google Drive. Most of the time, people don't bother with even Markup. All those asterisks and double-asterisks. Many people just post links, rather than that paren / brace stuff like on Reddit. Yes, HTML can get downright complicated. The vast majority of the time, people don't even Markup. As for p tags, the site could have white-space: pre-wrap style applied to all comments. Boom. And again, markup is nice and all. So is Notepad. But I like HTML, and I like IDEs. And to be clear, I'm not saying a site would allow all HTML tags (that would be suicide with the first <script>), but would whitelist them. Then, there's no CPU time to render Markup into HTML. So, there's that. |