I'm definitely playing the devil's advocate here, but didn't assembly programmers have the same kind of reaction regarding compiler generated assembly not so long ago?
Assembly is low level; practically machine code. It is hard for humans to read, and writing a program concept in assembly must go through a lot of layers.
HTML is high-level and designed for humans to read and write. It maps directly to the concepts it conveys.
I registered just so I could say this. People keep comparing HTML to Assembly. Come on. HTML is probably the highest level you can get when talking to a computer, at least for the foreseeable future.
I think the more appropriate comparison is to those software generators, or whatever they are called, in which you drag and drop buttons and text fields and have arrows (or something) to convey action.
You don't see a lot of good software made with those, now, do you?
HTML is not Assembly. It's not even C. It's Python, or Ruby.
As Deestan said, there's a massive difference between how low level assembly code is, and how high level HTML is. But even more than that is the fact that they're fundamentally different. Decomposing a sequential list of instructions down into machine code is something that a is fairly simple to do algorithmically. But HTML is not a programming language - it is a descriptive instead of declarative or imperative.
In the end, humans are a lot better at describing things than algorithms, and I think that's the biggest problem with WYSIWYG HTML editors.
