Yep, I am writing the posts in HTML. The reason to avoid Markdown (which I love) and other things is to avoid any kind of building tools. I tried to install Gatsby on a Windows machine and I had several errors. I wanted to remove any dependency on external software. I wanted it to be modifiable with just a text editor and nothing else.

Regarding the use of <span> is because the <p> tag with the chosen CSS leaves too much space after <h*> tags, while <span> doesn't, and as I wanted to just use HTML tags and not create my own version of the CSS, I found <span> the easiest way to achieve that.