The Internet as a whole has become cumbersome...but so has the Long Island Expressway, over time.

What was once a fast way to get from the city to the country for weekends, is now a hoary, stalled, pollutionary mess.

So too the "web".

We need thinkers, designers, administrators, builders...quality people to make it better.

I think browser should take a step forward from being just document hosts and move to being application hosts

read this...

[visit link]

> Is there anybody in the planet who wants to publish something online today but can't because of problems with HTML?

Yes. Mashups for one. Due to same origin domain restrictions, I can't write an HTML page that can pull data from multiple sites without having to write a lot of server-side proxy code that requires my servers to handle all of this traffic. The client browser should be able to request the information on its own. And, if I want to display information on a single page that requires you to login to multiple sites, the situation is even worse because there is no standard and secure way to do that. Web security has been an afterthought requiring kludgy workarounds. The web is pretty much a hacked up mess instead of being well-designed and engineered. Maybe this is okay for some who don't mind living in a world put together by bubble gum, toothpicks, and duct tape, but as computer scientists, if this is the best we can do, then we've really failed as a discipline.

Interesting ideas. I especially like the "module" concept, which could help to standardize, secure, and simplify a lot of AJAX and similar concepts.

HTML5 is HTML + standard handling of broken HTML. Actually, it just describes the way mozilla handles broken HTML and proposes this as a standard. (for example, what should happen if you write some text between BLAH? It should be moved before the table because this is what mozilla does, by accident)

I say bring on HTML 5, and bring on the strict. Make it look good in both browsers. End the sheer boredom of trying to make code display well on FireFox and IE, both of which are bloated pieces of crap, when it works just fine in Opera.

Simplify, and abstract, but don't expect HTML coders to be coders... it's a language for layout for the rest of us, and its genius has always been its simplicity and adaptability.

I love how the first sentence is:
>>HTML needs fixing.

O RLY? HTML is probably the most widely deployed document format in the entire history of computing (after ASCII plaintext, which I'm not sure counts as a "format"). An unknowably huge number of documents are authored in it every day. All but a tiny fraction are successfully retrieved and rendered by millions of clients ranging from dual-core desktop PCs to mobile phones.

It's one thing to say "HTML is ugly" (to which I'd agree) or "HTML needs extending" (I'd agree with that too) but "HTML needs fixing"? Really? Is there anybody in the planet who wants to publish something online today but can't because of problems with HTML?