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.
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.You stopped using stupid characters that aren’t in the English alphabet.