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Hey! Thanks for covering Declarative Partial Updates! The reason we use Processing Instructions (<?marker>, <?start>, and <?end>) rather than HTML elements is to allow you to insert content without breaking existing HTML. For example, if you wanted to optionally add new row(s) (<tr>) to a table.

If you used a <div> or <span> then you’d nest the contents. Which would break the DOM structure (like in this table example). Or if you used <tr> in this example, you could only insert one row. Or have to really mangled the DOM which is not good!

@davatron5000.bsky.social for HTML templating in the browser, I think you're looking for XSLT 👀 Browsers finally killed off the Space Jam-era 1.0 spec but refused to consider implementing v3 ✅ HTML-based templates ✅ if/else syntax ✅ for loops ✅ "HTML" imports with XSLT template imports