Comment by tannhaeuser

> XML has always seemed to be a data standard which is intended to be what computers prefer, not people.

On one hand, you aren't wrong: XML has in fact been used for machine-to-machine communication mostly. OTOH, XML was just introduced as a subset of SGML doing away with the need of vocabulary-specific markup declarations for mere parsing in favor of always requiring explicit start- and end-element tags. Whereas HTML is chock full of SGMLisms such as tag inference (for example inferring paragraph ends on block elements), empty ("self-closing") elements and enumerated ("boolean") attributes driven by per-element declarations.

One can argue to death whether the web should work as a mere document delivery network with rigid markup a la XML, or that browsers should also directly support SGML authoring idioms such as the above shortform mechanisms. SGML also has text macros/shared fragments (entities) and even allows defining own parsing tokens for markdown, math, CSV, or custom syntaxes. HTML leans towards SGML in that its documentation portrays HTML as an authoring language, but browsers are lacking even in basic SGML features such as entities.