>I do. That's why I have a browser render it to a format that makes sense for human consumption.

I guess if that's the standard then reading any data format is also a slog because hey, most data and document formats get rendered as something for "human consumption" but that said when one is a programmer one often has to read the format without the rendering, and so, your witty reply aside I guess you must find this task where HTML is concerned a slog.

This is too bad because most mixed content formats like EAD, HTML etc. are like that, and if you want humans to be able to write the content with say a paragraph, but inside that paragraph is a link etc. you're going to write it mixed content, because that works best based on millions of programmer and editor hours over decades and JSON would be crap for it.

Is it super great, nope it's only the best way of writing document formats (with highly technical and mix of structured and unstructured content) that we currently know of, in the same way that Democracy is the worst form of politics except for all the all others and multiple other examples of things that suck in the world but are better than all the alternatives.

I didn't say EAD was great, I said it was better than JSON for what it needed to do, part of which is having humans write mixed content.

Believe me I have certainly seen people who have been JSON enthusiasts try to replicate mixed content type documents in JSON and it has always ended up looking at least as bad as any XML but without all the tooling to make it easier to write XML and with a tendency to brittleness because in doing mixed content in JSON you are going to have to do a lot of character escaping.

I'm going to end off here with the observation that I doubt you are actually acquainted with the workflows of editors, writers, publishing industries and the use of markup formats in any sort of long running type of company using these things? I just have a feeling on this matter. You seem like your technical area of expertise is not in the area you are critiquing? Some of these companies are actually quite technically advanced, so I'm just putting that out there that you might not be as aware of the requirements of parts of the world that use things that you would build in a superior manner if only you were given the task to do so.