"Why are we still writing HTML by hand? Could we do that visually instead, and have that kind of immediate connection with our app?"<p>It seems to me there's a rich answer to that question. It's not a good one per se, but it's a lot richer than meets the eye.<p>I've used any number of live HTML coders, going all the way back to the 20th century. (Dreamweaver, for instance, goes back to 1997!) But they always seem to suffer from the same problem for coders: They don't just take the HTML on the screen and then make it something you can use in code, because they always end up with a foreign model laid on top of them.<p>That is, for instance, you don't click the "center" button and get just the <center> tag added, or the correct CSS attribute, or dream of dreams, get center added to the "correct" CSS style. (Though that's starting to ask for a lot there, since multiple could be in effect.) The graphical editor invariably turns into a piece of software that receives that you want to "center" something and the "interprets" that in a way the manager for the product believes you "meant" for that command to mean. This generally involves spans and divs being thrown about willy-nilly as the programmers internally struggle to implement this vision in a way that works with HTML all the time. The crazier the manager setting the direction gets, the crazier the program gets. They start asking for things essentially impossible in HTML (or at least until recently), like, let me add this image with transparency and flow the text around the border rather than rectilinearly. The managers don't want their bullet-point feature list to be confined to merely what is good in HTML. They need more shiny flashy features! So, in this case, you probably end up with the text hard-laid out, losing all reflow capability, since that's all that was possible.<p>Run through a few iterations of "features" like that, and the resulting HTML is a monstrosity and useless to programmers. FrontPage was notorious for that sort of thing. Back when people still cared if you could hit "View Source" and learn something about how the page worked, FrontPage was something that made you groan... the sea of HTML looked like, well, what it looked like was a lot like a lot of modern pages, honestly! Only with a <i>lot</i> more "style=" attributes.<p>It would be interesting to build an HTML editor that worked like the Inspect mode. With enough source map support, you might just be able to scrape it all together now. UI will still be a bit klunky when it comes to "what CSS rule did you want to add this change to?", and whether it can integrate with every glorious CSS framework out there I don't know. But it might just about be able to work.