I don't really get this point... HTML is not _that_ complicated. I mean is:

<h1>this</h1>

<h2>this</h2>

<h3>this</h3>

really "more complex" than something like:

# this

## this

### this

You still need to know that '#' means header / title, and that more of them leads to a lower header level... and this is just for the most basic concept of web pages: headers. Okay, even if it's not markdown, no matter what system you cook up, the syntactic complexity to support the huge number of elements that exist in HTML has to live _somewhere_ right? (Yes, you can argue maybe not ALL of the 100+ HTML tags aren't needed, but probably most of them are!)

While there is something to be said for mega purists who don't even like JavaScript, we're supposed to not even like HTML anymore either? I think at some point you have to accept that building things for the web involves some minimum level of complexity...