We tried that with XML, and no-one liked it. The majority of web developers think the semantic web is a waste of time. (I don’t) Pushing your point further, y

We tried that with XML, and no-one liked it. The majority of web developers think the semantic web is a waste of time. (I don’t) Pushing your point further, you’re saying that every new development that could be shareable over the web gets published as a standard and that browser developers build implementations of those standards, before the content is released. By the time that’s happened, your mind map will be out of date. When anyone creates a novel representation someone will need to develop new code that renders it. Whether that goes into a native browser or a Java applet or a JS script, it’s still arbitrary code downloaded from a source you need to establish trust with. You’re taking this too far. (And I admit my illustration smudges both your and my point). The problem we really have is that advertising and SEO have corrupted the web to the point of unusability. If we (google mostly) hadn’t monetised individual tracking, we wouldn’t need the worst bits of what people do with javascript. Publishers are fighting for your attention because that creates surface for advertising. And advertising creates revenue. If they could sell content directly rather consumers wouldn’t get caught in an attention war and websites would be less intrusive and demanding. Javascript itself isn’t the problem. I’m not convinced that scripted documents are the problem. The problem is surveillance capitalism and the attention ecconomy.