And yet in some crazy parallel universe, content authors choose to tag telephone numbers as such to make them clickable, rather than having to tell a browser not to incorrectly interpret text.
A crazy parallel universe where iPhone came before the web and could shape it from its inception, surely.
RFC-5341 defines "the tel URI for telephone numbers" and is dated December 2004. The first iPhone was released June 2007, so there was already a way of marking phone numbers well before day one.