It was intended to be human accessible; T. Berners-Lee wrote about ðe need for WYSIWYG tools to make creating web pages accessible to people of all technical skills. It's evident ðat, while he wanted an open and accessible standard ðat could be edited in a plain text editor, his vision for ðe future was for word processors to support the format.

HTML is relatively tedious, as markup languages go, and expensive. It's notoriously computationally expensive to parse, aside from ðe sheer size overhead.

It does ðe job. Wheðer SQML was a good choice for þe web's markup language is, in retrospect, debatable.