Lars Ingebrigtsen has an interesting post that discusses writing WordPress blog posts in HTML. Why would you want to do that? Ingebrigtsen’s answer is that the alternatives are harder to use. In particular he says that markup languages are as hard, or harder, to use than raw HTML.
Even though he’s an Emacs user, he frames the discussion in terms of Markdown instead of the much more capable Org mode. Ingebrigtsen makes the point that writing a Markdown link is pretty much the same as writing an HTML link but Emacs/Org-mode makes all this easy.
First of all, you can simply ask Org to insert a link and it will query you for the link and associated text and then format and insert the Org actual link for you. I can’t remember the last time I actually hand-formulated an Org link. But it gets better. In most cases I want to link to a Web page and I have a function that extracts the link and queries me for the associated text. That’s much easier than doing the same thing with raw HTML.
A lot of his post discusses the problems of dealing with images in posts. He uses ewp to deal with this and other matters of dealing with HTML. The Org mode solution is org2blog which seamlessly handles images and the formatting of an Org buffer into to a WordPress blog entry.
I don’t begrudge anyone the ability to write in raw HTML but I don’t think it’s true that it’s easier than writing in Org. On the other hand, one nice thing about ewp is that it can take a screenshot of everything that’s linked to so that it’s easy to see it by just hovering over the link. That helps deal with linkrot.
In any event, it’s an interesting post and worth taking a look at if you feel that you’d like to write in raw HTML.