It is much more simple to code as


menuitem
menuitem
menuitem

The most simple method isn’t always the most appropriate or semantic. In this case marking a list of links up as a list is the most appropriate method, and in the case of your example, an unordered list would likely be the most appropriate type to use (unless the order was important).

If simplicity was a priority we’d all be publishing markup-less web pages and giving them a .txt extension.