HTML is already very verbose. Although 'header' and 'footer' appear (supposedly) once per page, styling inline elements requires to use 'strong' or the generic 'span' tag. And it's one situation when the tag is numerously repeated, which ends up in a very low signal/noise ratio.

My position may come from the fact that I type every line of code (I have no IDE, just Notepad++). But I think that there aren't enough HTML tags for us to have to use longer names in order to avoid confusion.

"I had imagined that figues would be reprented as <a name=fig1 href="fghjkdfghj" REL="EMBED, PRESENT">Figure </a>"

That would have really changed how things evolved. Probably then anything that was specifying an external resource would have all been anchors.