Well I'm not wringing my hands, and I don't think you really have the ability to comment on my body language. Let's keep this debate focused solely on the cont

Well I'm not wringing my hands, and I don't think you really have the ability to comment on my body language. Let's keep this debate focused solely on the contents of the talk. The ubiquity and deployability of the web is not an inherent quality of the design of html, css or javascript. The ubiquity and deployability seem to me to be largely due to the internet which is one of the comments that Kay makes. People confuse the workings of the internet with the workings of the web. Right now we send documents that are interpreted, but there is nothing to say we can't send objects which are "interpreted" (or JITed more likely). But his point in the talk I posted was that the amount of accidental complexity that is piling up on the web as we speak (and which will only get worse and worse) will eventually collapse upon itself. You can already see the complexity of things like javascript and css increasing as the web attempts to offer applications, not just documents, and doing this by having a committee standardize high-level behaviour like layout seems to be a poor approach in the long run. Most of the talk is focused on thinking in the long-term as well as working to decrease the complexity of the software edifices we are currently creating, before they become too large to improve in any revolutionary way. Who knows, maybe the next web will be built on top of the web, the way the web was built on top of the internet. The point of his comments in the talk is that we should explicitly think about the design of what we are building before we rush off to pile up code.