Actually, HTML hasn't changed much for many years now. Which is kindof the problem - everything around it (mostly CSS, and also JS) had to change ad absurdum to

Actually, HTML hasn't changed much for many years now. Which is kindof the problem - everything around it (mostly CSS, and also JS) had to change ad absurdum to exercise HTML into a scene graph for web apps. It's not like W3C and others hadn't tried to renovate HTML - that's what W3C's XML initiative was about in 1998, with a generic namespacing mechanism in anticipation of a wealth of new vocabularies (of which SVG and MathML, but not XHTML made it). I'd argue W3C people were so wound up in XML and "enterprise" tech for like ten years that the web stack was unprepared when the iPhone with requirements for mobile sites came around, and W3C became an easy target to take HTML away from. Mentioning this to warn against inventing new meta "formats" all the time - everything needed for HTML was already in existence before 1986 when SGML (on which HTML is based) was published. Including markdown and custom shortform syntax. Large parts of markdown can be specified using SGML shortref, yielding a shortform syntax that expands to HTML proper, capturing exactly the way markdown was originally specified.