[Stranger43]

Html was absolutely created for writing, though it later got hijacked as a system for creating UI's inside of the browser doing the browser wars of the 90ies, but if you look at the original specs, it's a way of marking up documents and it was very much readable even without a rendering engine.

Prior to html and the web revolution people would use different macro packages for either troff or TeX and, and in the first years of HTML people would absolutely write it by hand thinking very little of it but then again that was before style elements css and javascript.

After the browser wars almost everyone who working with documentation had their own perl, or ruby scripts to take some simplified markdown syntax into html and there is of cause a risk of markdown itself getting bloated to the point where people need scripts to turn simple meta formats into correct markdown.