HTML5 is specified in terms of unicode characters and forbids most control and non-characters[0]. In that sense it is human-readable text. It's not easy to read

HTML5 is specified in terms of unicode characters and forbids most control and non-characters[0]. In that sense it is human-readable text. It's not easy to read, especially when minified. But so is shorthand or very dense scientific texts. Some things are meant to be human-readable and machine-parsable at the same time. Those things are not mutually exclusive. And sometimes humans will complain even more than machines if you mangle their text in any way. [0] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#preprocessing-the-input-stream https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#preprocessing-the-input-stream