I'd be all for a free, semantic naming scheme - which we basically already have with the exception you mentioned; it's discouraged, but you could absolutely mak

I'd be all for a free, semantic naming scheme - which we basically already have with the exception you mentioned; it's discouraged, but you could absolutely make documents that way today. I think overall it's a good thing to have certain tags that are associated with default behavior. We could weed out some unneeded ones aggressively, but overall I think it's okay to be able to write a basic CSS-less HTML page that is not a formless mass by default. This mechanism also has traditionally benefited accessibility agents. So, it basically comes down to the question of whether it's time to remove the default rendering properties of tags. What we're left with then is decisions about the special attributes, as you mentioned. Some of these we could get rid of, too, and some could be made more general. We have painted ourselves a bit into a corner with the href attribute specifically. If we didn't sometimes have to use it for completely different things, it would be totally fine to declare every tag having an href attribute to have link-like behavior.