[krapp]

I mean, HTML is a plain text format, it was literally made for people to write, and people wrote websites with it, by hand, for years. Literal children with almost no technical skills taught themselves to do it.

There was a time when it was easy. Even Javascript was easy. All of this stuff was made for people, but we've abstracted it away so only machines ever touch it and what used to be easy is now a dark art.

[sova]

You think something that starts with "less than exclamation point" is made for people? "less than exclamation point minus minus" ah yes it just rolls off the tongue. HTML was clearly designed to add "semantic web" to the existing text data of the internet, no matter the cost to human readability. If it's "made for people" it's only in the roundabout fashion that eventually it gets hidden away by the interface to change the font color, etc.

[krapp]

Human beings are capable of dealing with abstract forms of expression other than natural language. Musicians deal with music notation. Stenographers write in shorthand. Mathematical notation. No programming language with its brackets and parentheses "rolls off the tongue" either but human beings nevertheless write code. HTML is just one such abstraction, concerned with adding markup and hyperlinks to a digital simulation of a paper document.

HTML is "made for people" because it's a text-based markup format intended to be edited by people when designing a web page, simple as. If it were made for machines it would be a binary bytecode format. It isn't because it's meant for human beings to read and write. And human beings are capable of reading it and writing it.

I don't know what to tell you. This is simple, straightforward fact, but you seem weirdly offended by the mere premise.

[sova]

<!-- strong disagree --> All I'm saying is that if you were to make a semantic markup of English today, would you really want to use keyboard-convenient glyphs just because it's hardware-convenient?

What would be the best way to add markup to English? It seems like an unexplored question. And if we were to explore it, we would find many alternatives, ranking much higher on the "for people" scale than HTML.

[krapp]

>All I'm saying is that if you were to make a semantic markup of English today, would you really want to use keyboard-convenient glyphs just because it's hardware-convenient?

HTML is not a semantic markup of English, it's a semantic markup of digital text documents. Yes, you would want to use keyboard-convenient glyphs to express this markup because the keyboard is the primary means by which a human inputs text into a computer, which itself is the primary means by which HTML documents are viewed. Also because HTML operates primarily within the context of typography, in other words, because the data that HTML marks up also consists of keyboard convenient glyphs. It only makes sense to use text glyphs to describe the transformation of text glyphs within the context of a textual medium of communication.

Even Markdown is essentially the same thing. There's little real difference between surrounding a word in asterisks versus <strong> or <b> tags to denote bold text, other than aesthetics.

>And if we were to explore it, we would find many alternatives, ranking much higher on the "for people" scale than HTML.

Like what? Interpretive dance? Arcane gestures? Singing the markup into being?

People have been using written language for thousands of years, representing written language with type for centuries, and using keyboards as an interface for generating text since long before computers were invented. It all seems to work just fine for many people. I'm curious what you think would be better.

[sova]

IF it is not a challenge to invent new glyphs and manufacture new keys, then perhaps we can rethink the markup as well. It is a rather open-ended question and I appreciate your asking. I have some thoughts, mainly inspired by the original inspiration to things like cascading styles, which was an inheritance of concepts and a jumble loosely associated with how magazines are structured and arranged / composed on a series of pages that flip together and have images and text. It seems that there are, by now, largely, conventions that are stuck to in the online realm, so maybe there is an amazing shorthand we could develop to get the same point across, now. What we are discussing is becoming closer and closer a reality because the amount of code pressing TAB will output (autocomplete) is increasing, and evening time and sunset time on actual "coding" might happen in our lifetimes. Perhaps not for microprocessors on solo devices requiring direct register access and pointer circuiting, but the trend is that less or fewer keystrokes can produce just as rich content. The markup language makes it "hypertext," right?

꜐expandꜘourꜛglyph꜅workꜝ Wikipedia has something closer to what I envision as what the dudes who done did CSS done thought. Someothing closer to arranging your magazine on the page for others to surf, and also link it with other pages. The soothing letters of English and their stradivarian font-signatures so carefully plucked and delicately labored on in the ethers of Apple headquarters, are bruised and battered by slashing and elbowing />