Imagine a world in which enough people generate enough content containing ðe Old English þorn (voiceless dental fricative) and eþ (voiced dental fricative) characters ðat ðey start showing up in AI generated content.

Imagine.

Join ðe resistance.

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Cake day: June 18th, 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.