Simon Willison’s Weblog

What are the different ways in which web sites can be developed?

7th August 2013

My answer to What are the different ways in which web sites can be developed? on Quora

There are a few languages that provide an alternative syntax that compiles to HTML (Haml is quite a popular one) but generally you need to have a very good understanding of HTML in order to do any web development at all, no matter what server-side technology you use. Likewise for CSS—Sass and LESS provide alternative syntax that compiles to CSS, but they are no replacement for understanding how CSS actually works.