I think what jakejake is getting at is that right now, anyone can pull up a page in their browser, click 'View Source' and see exactly how to express that page

I think what jakejake is getting at is that right now, anyone can pull up a page in their browser, click 'View Source' and see exactly how to express that page in a human-readable format. This is also true to a large extent (via various free development tools--some even baked into various browsers) for JavaScript and CSS. What's interesting is that what you describe: >this compiler, it could be automatically run by apache, IIS, nginx, etc ...essentially already occurs in many cases in the form of compression such as gzip. These files are also automatically extracted by the browser and are essentially as transparent as non-compressed ones. So I think you both have a point: I agree with jakejake that the web must remain transparent. I agree with you that as long as sufficient tooling is freely available, it doesn't matter how the underlying protocol works. I.e., a binary representation of the page is still fairly transparent if there are plentiful tools that will deserialize it into a page object that can be expanded/perused/manipulated and then re-serialized when e.g., Ctrl+s is hit. What would be bad is if 'View Source' showed something like: 01010100011010000110100101110011001000000110100101110011001000 00011011110111000001100001011100010111010101100101 etc. ...and you needed to spend umpteen hundreds to get a decompilation tool that only gave you an obfuscated/inexact reproduction of the recipe for the page.