Could you (or someone else) possibly expand on that? Is writing in raw HTML generally discouraged? I am totally ignorant in this area, but I am curious about it since I admire Mark's formatting and he seems to get a lot done.
I can't speak for the person you're commenting on - that is, I have no idea what the 'Hm' meant. Also, I don't think it's generally discouraged. Lots of people write raw HTML (in some contexts).
But I certainly wouldn't want to write an entire book in HTML - it forces you to type a lot of brackets and tags. I'm sure your editor could take a lot of work off your shoulders, but even at that you end up typing a ton of macros (I would think). In any case, it seems easier to me to type the bulk of it in Markdown (or the like) and only occasionally drop down to raw HTML. To each, his or her own though.
For longer documents, I haven't written in raw html for quite some time. I use Markdown instead, and had assumed that most everyone (except maybe some web designers) uses some form of prettier markup for writing their longer content-heavy documents; either Markdown, reST, or maybe MoinMoin-style wiki markup. Those seem to be the big three (with reST only making it into that group by virtue of being used for the official Python docs, and thus also for many Python-related projects).
