If you're worried that HTML is too verbose and therefore inefficient, that's not really an issue since it's going to be compressed in transit anyways. So then t

If you're worried that HTML is too verbose and therefore inefficient, that's not really an issue since it's going to be compressed in transit anyways. So then the question is, assuming that the compressed representation has the maximum information density, "what format should the decompressed web page be in". I think HTML is a pretty logical format to view the structure of the page. There are definitely plugins for auto-closing your HTML tags that will make your life easier, though.