Why is the "<" symbol named the "less-than sign"?

[James Tauber]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 10:17 PM John W Kennedy via Unicode <
unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

>
> : was changed to <, e (for “end”) was changed to /, and . was changed to
> >. The characters used, of course, had to be available in ASCII. I dare say
> early publications on SGML include a rationale.
>

Had to be available in ASCII, less likely to occur in character content,
and the < > pair visually suggests the open/close of markup (and alludes to
the older written convention of circling markup to distinguish it from
content).

James
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