Comment by tannhaeuser

> HTML and other web formats are only readable by the virtue of being constantly evolved while keeping the backwards compatibility, which is nowhere near complete and is hardware-dependent (e.g. aspect ratios, colors, pixel densities).

HTML itself is relatively safe, by virtue of it being based on SGML. Though it's not ideal either because those who think it's their job to evolve HTML don't bother to maintain SGML DTDs or use other long established formal methods to keep HTML readable, but believe a hard-coded and (hence necessarily) erroneous and incomplete parsing description the size of a phone book is the right tool for the job.

Let me quote the late Yuri Rubinski's foreword to The SGML Handbook outlining the purpose of markup languages (from 1990):

> The next five years will see a revolution in computing. Users will no longer have to work at every computer task as if they had no need to share data with all their other computer tasks, they will not need to act as if the computer is simply a replacement for paper, nor will they have to appease computers or software programs that seem to be at war with one another.

However, exactly because evolving markup vocabularies requires organizing consensus, a task which W3C et al seemingly weren't up to (busy with XML, XHTML, WS-Star, and RDF-Star instead for over a decade), CSS and JS was invented and extended for the absurd purpose of basically redefining what's in the markup which itself didn't need to change, with absolute disastrous results for long-term readability or even readability on browsers other than from the browser cartel today.