The thing is, layout is content. Even right here on HN. One comment being a reply to another is indicated visually with a level of indentation. That's semant

The thing is, layout is content. Even right here on HN. One comment being a reply to another is indicated visually with a level of indentation. That's semantic meaning. A comment saying "I disagree" carries vastly different meaning depending on what comment is its parent. If you remove layout from HN, you remove threading from conversations and lose or change the meaning of posts. We use layout to indicate meaning in all sorts of ways. Even a simple set of tabular data with two columns will depend on visual layout. An item for sale needs to be next to the correct price for that item, for example. An image with a caption depends on having the caption spatially near the image. I agree that it feels like layout belongs in a new layer of the stack. But how do you do that? You'd need all sorts of semantic meaning to be expressible in the data structures from the API. Things like parent/child post hierarchy, or item/price, or image/caption, or any number of other relations. How do you generalize that? This sounds tantamount to and as intractable as strong AI in the area of knowledge processing.