Somewhere in the middle is the holy grail: performant sites that are also editor friendly.
Remember Dreamweaver? Made great static sites. Good WYSIWYG editor. Nothing but static pages on the server. "Round trip HTML" - it took in HTML, edited it, and put it back out. If you created the HTML with Dreamweaver, it could put in some comments which told Dreamweaver not to change certain parts. This let you have page templates.
We can't have that any more. CSS is too much of a mess. The era of CSS flush/clear/div layout broke WYSIWYG editors, and the web took a big step backwards. We went through the "tables are bad" era, and eventually got them back as "layout tables". It might be worth defining a modern subset of HTML/CSS and having a Dreamweaver-like editor for it.
Markdown? Markdown is comparable to HTML 1.0. Or BBcode. It's gaining features and complexity as people demand more HTML features in Markdown.
I think everyone should learn some basic HTML. You still need a professional for design and templates though. If you already have an example page of what you are going to publish, its not hard to figure out the semantic elements. I think CSS helps as you only have to figure out what elements h1 p img, etc to use and the CSS will take care of the layout. My experience with visual editors CMS/ builders is that they are more complex and harder to learn then semantic HTML. As a web programmer that can also make some design, I hand code CSS gradients etc and use SVG for when CSS becomes too hacky, Im a bit slower then the Photoshop wizards, but then its already converted to web format, and as everything is hand coded its small too. Its always frustrating when another designer edits my SVGs in Photoshop blowing them up 100x in unreadable blob riddled. Just as when back in the days some other designer would edit the page in Dreamweawer.
Yeh, asuming we are still talking about hand written html and css, and not about auto generated and minified source. Complex layout tend to turn into a div nest. But most web pages can do fine or even better without the complexity - and get responsiveness and mobile support for free.
I work for a large organisation and a small part of our website is still maintained by a couple of non-technical editors using an old copy of Dreamweaver. Works great, though the sysops complain about keeping FTP going. Eventually they'll be moved onto our more modern but complicated CMS.
Remember Dreamweaver? Made great static sites. Good WYSIWYG editor. Nothing but static pages on the server. "Round trip HTML" - it took in HTML, edited it, and put it back out. If you created the HTML with Dreamweaver, it could put in some comments which told Dreamweaver not to change certain parts. This let you have page templates.
We can't have that any more. CSS is too much of a mess. The era of CSS flush/clear/div layout broke WYSIWYG editors, and the web took a big step backwards. We went through the "tables are bad" era, and eventually got them back as "layout tables". It might be worth defining a modern subset of HTML/CSS and having a Dreamweaver-like editor for it.
Markdown? Markdown is comparable to HTML 1.0. Or BBcode. It's gaining features and complexity as people demand more HTML features in Markdown.