Before the introduction of Visualforce, the Salesforce1 Platform had a feature called s-controls. These were simple files where you could write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There was no custom markup language included. In order to make things look like the Force.com GUI, a lot of HTML was required. If you wanted to create just a simple input form for a new Account record, so much HTML code was required that we can't easily show it to you without wasting dozens of pages of this book! The following is just a small, condensed excerpt of what the HTML would look like if you wanted to recreate such a screen from scratch:

<div class="bPageTitle"><div class="ptBody"><div class="content">
  <img src="/s.gif" class="pageTitleIcon" title="Account" />
  <h1 class="pageType">
    Account Edit<span class="titleSeparatingColon">:</span>
  </h1>
  <h2 class="pageDescription"> New Account</h2>
  <div class="blank">&nbsp;&lt...