Contrary to appearances, the W3C specifications are for the most part not designed for computers, but for people. You may think that <h1>, è and </ul> look ugly and unintuitive, but what would you think if they were called A378, 30C9 and 38F0 respectively? Most of the formats are in fact compromises between human-readability and computer efficiency. Some are more readable than others, because we expect more people to read them, others can be more cryptic, because "only" programmers will look at the source.