It wasn't really a choice in favor of "easier to author." It was a choice in favor of "will this actually get implemented, or just be fancy theorycraft?" No br

It wasn't really a choice in favor of "easier to author." It was a choice in favor of "will this actually get implemented, or just be fancy theorycraft?" No browser vendor was going to ship new features only in XML parsing mode, because that was author-hostile enough that it would lose them authors, and thus users. (Browser game theory.) The choice of HTML over XML syntax was purely practical, in this sense.