Well, when I write PHP/MySQL apps without all the plugins and libraries and crud, everything it sends to browsers is pure HTML. Manipulating the output can be done with server side code. It's just not as flashy and shiny.
Ah, no, that's not what I meant with that second bit; I was referring mostly to not having a <head> in your HTML, thus making your HTML less of a "document" and more just a free stream of bits of text with an <html> tag there purely to indicate what you should be parsing these as. (You don't even need that if you've sent a Content-Type, but removing it means you can't save the document because OSes+browsers are dumb and make no place for media-type metadata on downloaded files.)
Things that go in the <body> like "top navs" and "sidebars" actually are actually part of the resource-representation; it's just a compound "Page" resource that they're properly a part of. /posts/3 should get you "a post"; /pages/posts/3 (or whatever else you like) should get you "a web page containing a post."
But when you do use the "<head>-less" style, and are requesting a non-compound resource more like /posts/3, then a wonderful thing happens where you get literally no indentation in the resulting linted document. No recursive "block-level" structure; just single top-level block elements (<h1>, <blockquote>, <p>, and <addr> mostly) that transition to containing inline-reflowed text. It's quite aesthetically pleasing!
