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725: CodePen 2.0, Templates on the Web, The Year of HTML? CodePen 2.0 is out now and we're talking about the launch, the idea of templating on the web, and how HTML could look very interesting in the future.

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!