I think the parent is talking about android views. which are XML documents and almost everyone writes the XML instead of mucking about with the visual editor.
I was using Android studio from beta until the early 2.x series. It has been some time but there were indeed many cases in which I had to go dig in the XML representation of the UI file. I do hope and believe it is getting better.
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> .. View XML abstraction is not that far off from HTML/CSS.
Do you mean the underlying structure of xibs and storyboards? I don't think this is something anyone looks at willingly, much less actually work with.