Maybe what parent meant to suggest is to wait with "proper frontend" and keep ugly quick&dirty minimal HTML until the whole software/app/system/server/set-of-services/whatever is "done", and just works. Because once you distract yourself with making it pretty, it's a rabbit-hole of ever-new, ever-different, ever-more-promising paradigms to switch to and fro. But not sure if that was his idea here..

Yes. Write simple but correct HTML. Don't make it look nice. Make the UX good. Don't spend time with crazy JS frameworks. Simple forms. Use properties for screen readers and usability if you must. When you are learning avoid getting sucked into JS and CSS holes.

Yeah but users don't read the HTML, the browser does, and it doesn't care that you're using ten <br> tags for vertical spacing instead of an elegant CSS styling property.

Edit : just want to make it clear that I'm trying to paraphrase here, I don't know if I agree (although I do want to point out that HN is built in this philosophy)

I’d argue that in this era of mobile devices, hard-set line breaks like <br/> are a bad idea even in the immediate term. Regrettably, the front end isn't simple any more, and while the tooling doesn't help I think it's simply not an easy problem to fix any more.

You're absolutely right, but the comment above seemed to be explicitly making a point about getting acquainted with HTML GUI layouts.

yeah I was just giving an example of quick-and-dirty HTML that I thought was being advocated.

When you are learning spending time on the front end is a terrible time investment. Your first web apps are for yourself usually. This is exactly why the grandparent gets frustrated. Make an ugly app that works first.