If modern compilers were as inefficient and horrid as html design tools were a lot of people would code directly in ASM.
Also, HTML is not ASM, it's a very high level language. The ability to code a scant few hundred lines and nevertheless have that become a full-featured, rich, beautiful, and complete layout for a web page or a web app UI is tremendously powerful, and it's no wonder that high end web devs and designers take advantage of that. Until web design "compilers" approach anywhere within spitting distance (even within a factor of 2) of hand coded designs in terms of maintainability, cross-browser compatability, performance, and code size that's not going to change.
> If modern compilers were as inefficient and horrid as html design tools were a lot of people would code directly in ASM.
Well, compilers may be good for languages such as C++. But for most languages such as Python and Ruby, the code executed is just plain terrible compared to ASM. I don't see anyone writing Ruby code and complaining about that waste, though...
Also, HTML is not ASM, it's a very high level language. The ability to code a scant few hundred lines and nevertheless have that become a full-featured, rich, beautiful, and complete layout for a web page or a web app UI is tremendously powerful, and it's no wonder that high end web devs and designers take advantage of that. Until web design "compilers" approach anywhere within spitting distance (even within a factor of 2) of hand coded designs in terms of maintainability, cross-browser compatability, performance, and code size that's not going to change.