Is this similar to Enigma decoding - whereby the 'encoding' key was reasonably predictable and not random due to new keys being required to be generated regularly?
There was a time when you had to know how to write HTML - also FTP - oh and Fax letterheaded paper to register a domain
Looking back now - MS Frontpage was way ahead of its time dealing with this abstraction of generating html - you saw the source change which the browser (unfortunatley just ie - but that's what we had) would render when you made an edit