No one is forcing you to create verbose tag/attribute names. If we are authoring content that we expect to last a few decades, markup is the proven engineering

No one is forcing you to create verbose tag/attribute names. If we are authoring content that we expect to last a few decades, markup is the proven engineering choice. It used to be sigil markup $1, $x, @@p etc., and other proprietary markup. SGML came and introduced DTDs, entities, parsing etc., DocBook format is pretty good for technical manuals. They pretty much covered 98% of the use cases for technical books. It would be foolish to invent a different format (using say JSON representation or some other proprietary format) for those use cases. SGML grew too complex and then came XML in the late 90s and took off when SOAP started gaining traction for web services in the early '00s. Unfortunately, XML almost went the SGML way on complexity with the addition of namespaces, multiple schema languages etc., But, we can never fault XML for its expressivity. There is also a good tooling available due to the work of many standardization workgroups and browser/vendor support. If you choose to archive content using XML, you can be guaranteed that you can parse it 20-30 years later since XML is a simple format (if you use a simple subset of features).