Regarding the "simple conversion of existing HTML" part ... well, someone has to have knowledge of HTML in order to do this. With Krang you set up the skeleton of the document and provide objects that render themselves when published while simultaneously providing widgets (input boxes, radio buttons, text areas, etc.) that allow your users (editors) to enter in the content. But someone with a good knowledge of HTML has to set up the page framework, and someone with a good knowledge of Krang sets up the overall object heirarchy and Apache configuration.

As for "keeping the doc as a single HTML document," when you publish a page in Krang, you have a single, static HTML document. Your editors edit the document via a webpage form that you, the Krang developer create for your editors. It is possible to this without having to have your editors know HTML or HTML::Template, but you will have to jump through many frustrating hoops to accomplish this.

What it sounds like is that you want to have your cake and eat it too. Rarely is this possible, you have to make compromises. Krang indeed addresses these issues, but you have to do a lot of work to climb that steep learning curve. Since i myself do have a bit of Krang knowledge and experience, i would look into Krang to solve this problem.

I am of the belief, however, that people who want to make HTML pages should at least learn HTML or be prepared to hire skilled web developers. Would you trust just anybody to work on your car or house? Didn't think so. Why do people insist that the websites should have the ability to be built and maintained by unskilled people? :(

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

that brings up a good point...I like how perlmonks is set up where if you need any sort of formatting you need to do it yourself. However, i feel it convenient to have a WYSIWYG editor to be able to implement proper formatting without having to code everything. This is somewhat straying away from the subject, but i feel as a developer, if you know what you need, why spend time coding it by hand, introducing the potential for erroneous code when you could click a button and put in a few attributes and have it perfect every time? this isn't saying that yes, people that don't have a clue about HTML should be able to do HTML involved things, but I think it's nice like I said to be able to have something else to do the tedious busy work.

downvote if this is too off topic, don't get me wrong, jeffa brings up a great point, but i think a certain degree of "laziness" is nice for speed.

meh.

Heh, that sounds somewhat like a description of PerlMonks Editor. :)

Note to self: must go get the next version of that out!

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DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel