I remember from that time those who where trying to do the "semantic web", some kind of complexity abomination... and in the end we got the current scripted gig

I remember from that time those who where trying to do the "semantic web", some kind of complexity abomination... and in the end we got the current scripted gigantic and grotesque DOM abomination locked up/financed by big tech. Yep, I considered that was a loss/loss. I recall too how the major web browsers did everything to make xhtml dev a massive pain (that was clearly sabotage). In the end, you have to choose doing html "à la xml", or the html "à la sgml" (which is seriously ugly to parse). The only way to cleanup that big tech lock-down/mess: regulation on critical(utility) web sites with noscript/basic (x)html (like they mostly were a few years ago). Can we get a clean "better"? Well, if it is as simple (complexity _and_ size) to implement than html parsing, and as stable in time, yeah. As far as I know, it does not exist.