this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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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.