Although HTML was not meant to be read by the end user, many of the compromises it made from its parent, SGML, do seem to have been intended to make it more eas

Although HTML was not meant to be read by the end user, many of the compromises it made from its parent, SGML, do seem to have been intended to make it more easily manipulated (as in both read and written by a somewhat technical human user). No unnamed close tags, extreme flexibility on presence or absence of opening and closing tags, case insensitivity, overlapping nesting, etc. All these things make things much harder for a computer to reliably process the document but theoretically much easier for a human to follow them. Of course, in the long run as these things pile up it actually ends up being counterproductive. It's just hard for both.