One would never use HTML to transfer data between two systems*, this author really missed the Forest for the trees.
*unless of course one system is scraping the other and has no control of what it outputs.
*unless of course one system is scraping the other and has no control of what it outputs.
And yet it happened all the time back in the day, and there was even a big push to get into XML-izing html to xhtml and make it stricter and parsable and "semantic".