You might want to investigate Gemini. It appears to be one response to the case you are presenting. It starts at the protocol level and they are starting to bui

You might want to investigate Gemini. It appears to be one response to the case you are presenting. It starts at the protocol level and they are starting to build up an ecosystem of servers and clients which are more hypertext focused (No JS, limitations on content-types, etc...). I believe the name Gemini was chosen to imply a middle-ground between Gopher and HTTP (Gemini was the NASA project between Mercury and Apollo).