My own personal vainglorious idea about the opportunity missed with the web is much more radical yet. Semantic markup (remember, TBL originally designed HTML t

My own personal vainglorious idea about the opportunity missed with the web is much more radical yet. Semantic markup (remember, TBL originally designed HTML this way) failed already once for a reason. Markup language was a bad choice to begin with. Instead of an SGML-derived markup, we should have had a set of primitive s-expressions that were supported in a standard allowing people to extend the behavior of browsers by implementing renderers based on any kind of s-expression. Wanna extend your browser? Just implement a renderer. Wanna distribute a renderer? Fine; the interface of renderers are part of the standard. You can distribute the renderer along with your page. There would never have been JS to begin with: that gets handled right out of the box with s-expressions.