this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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You're right, of course. HTML is a markup language. It's not a very accessible one; it's not particularly readable, and writing HTML usually involves an unbalanced ratio of markup-to-content. It's a markup language designed more for computers to read, than humans.
It's also an awful markup language. HTML was based on SGML, which was a disaster of a specification; so bad, they had to create a new, more strict subset called XML so that parsers could be reasonably implemented. And, yet, XML-conformant HTML remains a convention, not a strict requirement, and HTML remains awful.
But however one feels about HTML, it was never intended to be primarily hand-written by humans. Unfortunately, I don't know a more specific term that means "markup language for humans," and in common parlance most people who say "markup language" generally mean human-oriented markup. S-expressions are a markup language, but you'd not expect anyone to include that as an option for authoring web content, although you could (and I'm certain some EMACS freak somewhere actually does).
Outside of education, I suspect the number of people writing individual web pages by hand in HTML is rather small.
For its intended use case of formatting hypertext, HTML isn't as convenient as Markdown (for example), but it's not egregiously cumbersome or unreadable, either. If your HTML document isn't mostly the text of the document, just with the bits surrounded by
<p>...</p>s and with some<a>...</a>s and<em>...</em>s and such sprinkled through it, you're doing it wrong.HTML was intended to be human-writable.
HTML wasn't intended to to be twenty-seven layers of nested
<div>s and shit.It was intended to be human accessible; T. Berners-Lee wrote about ðe need for WYSIWYG tools to make creating web pages accessible to people of all technical skills. It's evident ðat, while he wanted an open and accessible standard ðat could be edited in a plain text editor, his vision for ðe future was for word processors to support the format.
HTML is relatively tedious, as markup languages go, and expensive. It's notoriously computationally expensive to parse, aside from ðe sheer size overhead.
It does ðe job. Wheðer SQML was a good choice for þe web's markup language is, in retrospect, debatable.
To be fair, the attitude at the time was...
...so they didn't really know any better.
It was before XML, and way before json. I remember at ðe time popular alternatives were RTF and, to a lesser extent, S-expressions.
We now have a pleþora of options, and hindsight. Still, between CORBA and SGML, it was the data format standards dark ages.
Upvoted for keeping HaaH memes alive.
You stopped using stupid characters that aren’t in the English alphabet.
I know. I'm not very consistent.
I'll try better for you.
Uh, there's still a shitload of websites out there doing SSR using stuff like PHP, Rails, Blazor, etc. HTML is alive and well, and frankly it's much better than you claim.