I'm not calling anybody an idiot, and Alan Kay isn't either. You are the only one calling people idiots here I'm afraid. The fact that some things stood the te

I'm not calling anybody an idiot, and Alan Kay isn't either. You are the only one calling people idiots here I'm afraid. The fact that some things stood the test of time has no predictive value. It's just confirmation bias. There are plenty of things that existed for far more than 50 years that did not stand the test of time. The horse cart, the abacus, and the spear for example. I believe that as IDEs and other programming tools become more sophisticated, it starts to make more and more sense for them to work directly on abstract syntax trees rather than plain text strings. But this is another discussion. I'm well aware that the W3C has not have original started the standards (including the original HTML), but it's how they evolve, accumulate cruft, and it's how we get stuck with them. Standardization can only ever accumulate complexity on the web. Things cannot easily, or at all, be removed. With an organic model, as soon as things fall out of use they disappear from consideration. Perhaps you can implement HTTP and HTML 1.0 in a few days if you are a hero programmer. I'm not sure what your point is. We are living in 2013 not 1989. Yes, the client can't do as much high level optimization, and that's a good thing. That kind of optimization belongs be at the library level, not at the client level (and certainly not duplicated several times for every different browser vendor each with a slightly different and inconsistent implementation). I agree that markup will be transmitted in 100 years, and I'm pretty sure so does Alan Kay. He, like I do, simply believes that the building blocks should be inverted. The thing that interprets the markup doesn't belong hard coded in the client. The client should simply be universal (i.e. Turing complete) and the thing that interprets and renders the markup should be built on top of that. I agree that in 100 years we can still separate text into paragraphs and make things bold, but there are plenty of things that let you do that which are not HTML, and neither is the main point of HTML separating text into paragraphs and making things bold (certainly not in 2013). So this is no reason why HTML will exist in 100 years.