Stephen said:
Why would one want to build a site from the ground up? In case someday I'm
caught in the desert with nothing but Notepad?
If it's a simple site then it's less hassle than messing around running
things through unnecessarily complex software. Once you have a macro on a
text editor to set up paragraph and anchor tags it's at least as quick as
FP or DW, and in the same league as the best CMSs.
For a complex design it becomes essential to deal with the mark up
directly if it's a commercial site. Either by working from the ground up
or by editing automatically generated mark up line by line. It's the only
way to be sure of your ground on accessibility and it makes a huge
difference when it comes to search engines.
There's no need if it's a hobby site. It's not going to get sued if it's
not accessible and nobody loses money if there's less traffic than there
could be. However a professional job for a commercial site pretty much
requires that extraneous mark up be removed and that the essential aspects
of the site don't have any nasty surprises hidden away that might trip up
a browser somewhere along the line.
When push comes to shove html is conceptual mark up, not a programming
language and not a form of low tech DTP. If there's one thing in the world
that software can't handle it's "conceptualisation". To get a halfway
decent result a human being has to look over the mark up at some point in
the process.
