[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.