It's 1998, you make a website in the copy of frontpage express that came with your computer, it's just like Word and it's very easy, you figure out how to upload it to the couple megs of web space that your ISP gives you (the instructions are on their website), you visit your site in your browser and everything's fine and the site's readable and everything looks the way it should

🦝 "Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026" you think to yourself for some reason

The site works fine but sometimes you get email from guys - always guys - telling you that the code sucks because you used frontpage express

You don't bother replying because it doesn't matter, the site works fine, but this does discourage you somewhat, so you get a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver on CD from a guy outside the computer market. His stall was a tarp on the ground.

Dreamweaver is WAY better than frontpage! It shows you the HTML code side by side with the website, so when you move things around you can see how that changes the code. Pretty neat! Doesn't matter, but pretty neat! You can see what the tedious guys were talking about now, the code that frontpage made was a real mess, so you tidy it up just to avoid getting angry emails from weirdos about shit that doesn't matter
After a little while you start spending more time in the code bit 'cause your brain's gotten fucked to the point where it's easier to type out <b>shit like this</b> than to hit the Bold button

@ifixcoinops Okay, the thing that Gets My Goat about typing into a thingy with a Bold button is this. You've got a document. It's got a bit of bold text in it. You place the cursor next to the bold text. Will the next thing you type be bold, or not?

(The answer is always "whatever would be most obnoxious". I have no idea how they have such good predictive technology for the sole purpose of making things bold when they shouldn't be and not bold when they should.)

Sometimes this is a case of "is that space bold or not" (something I always want to have to wonder about), but sometimes it's literally whether placing the cursor on a formatting boundary puts it inside the formatting or not.

When you're writing markup, you're screwing around with markup, but at least you don't have to deal with any of That.

@ifixcoinops Back when I used a WYSIWYG word processor, I vehemently disliked Word and used WordPerfect (probably just dated myself pretty badly there) because it had a "reveal codes" mode you could use to interact directly with the formatting codes and e.g. figure out if the spaces surrounding your bolded words were bold.
@whbboyd @ifixcoinops It's 3.30am in my world, year doesn't matter, I'm scrolling on my phone in bed while waiting for painkillers at 4am to happen, and I just gave a little whimper of yearning when you said WordPerfect.