Well, yes. You bring up good points. However, engineers like ourselves caught up in the goal of creating a One True System often run into the dilemma of pursu

Well, yes. You bring up good points. However, engineers like ourselves caught up in the goal of creating a One True System often run into the dilemma of pursuing the "MIT way" of doing things. I remember hearing that there was an MIT project that had many common goals with Tim Berner Lee's implementation of the World Wide Web. It never saw the light of day because the engineers were worried to death about how documents would appear if there was a connectivity problem. Lee sidestepped that whole mess by showing the good old 404 page. Premature optimization is the devil. The prevalence of html + js today is a testament to the fact that the ["worse is better"](http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html) design philosophy has its merits. I don't think this common document format will take off b/c of the same reasons that every other document format that isn't html + json has failed. I believe that if the browser wars have taught us anything, it's that iterative approach is the only thing which will move us closer to realizing some of your goals.