I'll take sexps over sgml any time. Why do you think this is worse than the corresponding HTML code? You don't have the madness of the closing tag having to rep

I'll take sexps over sgml any time. Why do you think this is worse than the corresponding HTML code? You don't have the madness of the closing tag having to repeat the name of the element, the odd idiosyncrasies with self-closing tags, the arbitrary division and restrictions between attribute and children nodes... And of course in the context of writing lisp code it means that you have a uniform syntax instead of having some parts of the file as HTML and others in an other language (which is often a pain with code editors in my experience). It still baffles me that SGML and its descendants are so popular. They're quirky, terribly noisy for markup, incredibly large and slow for serialization and of course every variation introduces and removes arbitrary limitations.