Big fan of React. For others using it, why use JSX instead of just doing everything in js? In other words, why is HTML like this: Lorem ipsum... Preferable to something like this (which can easily be done with some helper methods wrapping the verbose React DOM methods): $group({styles: style.group}, $image({styles: image, src: 'http://...'}), $text({styles: style.text}, 'Lorem ipsum...')); No pre processing step requ…
For me, I find it much easier to get an understanding of the structure of the components by looking at hierarchical markup vs. plain old JS. Everyone has a different idea of how they want to lay out their JS, but most people know/agree on what XML should look like.
Having a preference for reading HTML seems fair, though I prefer closing parens to closing tags for short bits, and the JS formatting problem is one you've already got in the rest of your code base. Also, you'll be formatting HTML + JS bits and not just static HTML like in the example. JSX seems like a good deal of machinery to support this preference.