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 A More Humane Machine Readable Language ?

The proponents of these markup languages represent their creations as an improvement over implementing rules by programming logic, and that is true from the standpoint of flexibility, but I'm not sure if they are any more readable than programming logic to ordinary human beings. But this make the end user completely reliant on ontology editors to interact with the final representation of the knowledge. Are markup languages the strength or the soft underbelly of the Semantic Web ?

It's a critical factor and, in my opinion, there doesn't seem to be a simple way to express rules in both a machine-readable and human readable form at this point of time, although there are some interesting efforts toward Semantic Web editors of various sorts.

Does It Translate ?

There is also an strong international flavor to the Semantic Web, even at this early stage. Unlike the Web 1.0 and maybe Web 2.0, the Semantic Web "3.0" is not going to be an English only affair  ( or nearly so ) as it was for the previous Web x.x initiatives.  Translation to and from some sort of structured form ( English or German or Spanish or whatever ) is probably still an absolute requirement for a multi-lingual rule language that is also usable by the majority of ordinary human beings.