> There is something remarkable about the fact that, with everything we have created in the past 20 years or so, I can still take a complete beginner and teach them to build a simple webpage with HTML and CSS, in a day.
Speaking as someone who has spent many hours lovingly hand-crafting CSS, I don't see how this beats using ms word or google docs or any other way to produce a static document. You can even have those editors output to HTML. I can teach somebody to do this in minutes, rather than in a day. What actual deliverable can people produce using html+css that isn't easier to make with other tools?
You can, and there's nothing wrong with it if that's what you need to do (using word/google docs).
That's not the point of the author though. She's saying compared to frameworks like React and Angular, making a web page in HTML/CSS is a lot easier.
The subsequent point being, once someone has taken a day to learn HTML/CSS this way, it acts as an entry point to get into more complicated stuff (i.e. js frameworks, or backend coding, etc.) and become a web developer.
You can use word or docs to create a static document. Sometimes that's all you need to do. Then you're done. It doesn't make you want to get into web development because of having done that. (sometimes, maybe, if you're interested enough afterwards.)
Nowadays the industry wants React devs. If you're an outsider, you have to very intentionally put yourself through bootcamps so you can get hired. React is not easy to learn. It's not easy even if you have a computer science background (but never done web dev). Just "picking up React" as an outsider is nearly impossible.
If you have 2 million academic papers in PDF format and the deliverable is a table of p-score by school. HTML is a compromise between ease of use and keeping metadata in the document.
That's why we tried UML to model the relationships of the data as distinct from design choices, like the (x, y) of the image on the third slide. Either party likes stripping all the metadata from the other, so HTML is now the standard so we can share inefficient, festering hunks of shit over the internet.
A word processor or a web publishing framework are more complex and less tractable than HTML and CSS written in a text editor. Even if you manage to export something it will be mangled and you haven't learnt the tools or produced the result that you set out to.
Learning HTML and publishing something on the web is a uniquely technically empowering feeling.
HTML and CSS are probably the absolute worst thing for document creation and management. HTML/CSS are in fact complex, and suffer major issues with export, long-term backup, sharing/collaboration, revision control, review-workflows, printing, security (encryption and password access) and consistent presentation. This is why you want government documents stored in PDF, ODF, or DOCX and not in HTML/CSS.
I get that it's empowering, as a hobby I spend a lot of time on it! But much like building a ship in a bottle, mastering the unicycle, or running your own enterprise-grade server rack at home, I can't justify such a painstaking and intricate craft with proportional utility.
Platforms like wordpress, squarespace, and wix all make a killing by providing a 'good enough' experience with a WYSIWYG interface, and I think that's empowering a large set of people who neither want nor need to learn CSS syntax.
(I do suppose understanding the basics of the DOM is helpful for any internet user, but you don't even need to publish anything for that info to be valuable!)
Speaking as someone who has spent many hours lovingly hand-crafting CSS, I don't see how this beats using ms word or google docs or any other way to produce a static document. You can even have those editors output to HTML. I can teach somebody to do this in minutes, rather than in a day. What actual deliverable can people produce using html+css that isn't easier to make with other tools?