I get that. But the downside is that my front-end developer can't write HTML anymore, which is her primary skill. Instead she now needs to learn smalltalk. All other things being equal, I'll pick a framework that doesn't involve re-training my staff.
The angle that Seaside is going for is that the software will emit the HTML, and the front-end people should be writing CSS and JavaScript to build applications.
Seaside is not a publication focused framework; the goal is to build web applications with it - so the emphasis is different.
Yes, we hire someone to write HTML specifically. We're a large company, and we have a lot of interface to get written in a combination of CSS, JS and HTML. Lots of big companies do it this way.
I think markup generated programmatically is going lack readability and flexibility. I think for anything other than trivially simple interfaces, programmatically generating markup is going to be a bottleneck versus just marking it up and substituting variables. However, these are just opinions. That's why I'm not going to use this framework, it doesn't mean it's not right for other people.
