No it&#x27;s not getting preprocessed to actual HTML in React. Depending on the transform function, it can be turned to an object tree or a function calls tree (like in React) or actually HTML like you said but it&#x27;s not a common use case AFAIK.<p>It&#x27;s not a text templating language like classic PHP, it&#x27;s an object&#x2F;function calls hierarchy DSL (more like vb.net XML literals). I think most people critisizing react for putting html in JS havn&#x27;t tried it or don&#x27;t remember why &quot;html&quot; in code was considered bad in the first place.