> HTML is not the mother language - It's actually pretty terrible for describing dynamic user interfaces.
I disagree a lot on HTML here - it's a pretty fantastic way of describing a render and layout tree, so much so that people are embedding HTML-like syntax in programming languages because the syntax is better than what the language already has to offer.
To paraphrase something I've heard: JSX proves that HTML actually won.
And you can see this because even in a language with concise object literals like JS, a markup based syntax is nicer. There are template systems where you write objects, and I find them cumbersome and they're not very popular.
But markup is king, whether it's in JS like JSX or Lit-like tagged template literals, or in an HTML-like file like Angular, Vue, or Svelte. They all share a markup-based syntax.
> If HTML is so magical why do they need a fancy template language?
Note that Rich doesn't say that HTML is magical. He says it's good, which it undeniably is. It describes elements with attributes and children, which happens to be exactly the structure you need for the vast majority of UI widget concepts.
The reason you need a fancier template syntax is that while HTML is good it isn't perfect. HTML doesn't have a dynamic binding syntax (though standards is working on that with Template Instantiation) or conditionals, and attributes are underpowered.
So template systems generally add those things. Whether it's JSX, Svelte, lit-html, Angular, etc... they share those common enhancements.
The only real big disagreement is whether you embed the logic in HTML or the HTML in JS. It's not even that fundamental of a difference.
I prefer HTML-in-JS myself (note: I'm on the Lit team) because JS already has binding syntax, expressions, control flow; because the data is already available in JS; and because JS has a module system and you can do all the things without forking a language or a build step.
But having been on the Polymer side too, which is logic-in-HTML, I know that a lot of people prefer HTML syntax and that to some it's more clear how it maps to the DOM created on the page, simply due to syntax similarity. That's fine. But it's really all variants of HTML in the end.