That may yet happen.

Although CSS sucks more than a very sucky thing, and the text+markup idea barely makes sense in 2016, I can see how we got here - and how CSS needed to hit the classic "worse is better" sweet spot that allowed designers to play, and not just people who code.

But that was then. If someone invents a meta-protocol now and implements a meta-browser/meta-server for it, I'd expect cult/niche status at least.

And such a web would be far slower. Restyling is usually the slowest part of the rendering pipeline in an optimized implementation. Throwing arbitrary tree transformations made with a Scheme interpreter into the mix would be totally irresponsible without looking at what the consequences would be for performance.

Isn't it the way Qt + QML works?

Last time I checked, this stack wasn't particularly slow. I would also express the same style in much less lines of code than HTML + CSS.

When I was 6 years old, in 1996, my parents gave me a book about "Cyberspace" to go along with our dial-up internet connection (on our Pentium 100mhz Windows 95 computer!). This book showed me Gopher, and MUDs, and changed my life! I wish I could remember the name of it, it was a bright yellow cover with a superhero on it, I think.

I miss Gopher, in a rose-tinted glasses nostalgia-driven way

> I wish I could remember the name of it, it was a bright yellow cover with a superhero on it, I think.

Could it be Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelson:

Cover of the 1974 edition: http://blogs.brandeis.edu/sarahw/files/2011/03/cover1.jpg

Front cover of the 1987 edition (in yellow): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Lib-Dream-Machines-Tempus/... (sorry, I have no image of the back cover, but I have both editions in my book shelf: Also the 1987 edition shows a superhero on its back cover (cover of Dream Machines)).

EDIT: If you want to order a reprint of the 1st edition (very difficult to get): Ted Nelson sells them again: http://hyperland.com/LibPage

I'm pretty sure I had the same book! The "superhero" was called "CyberSarge", yes?

https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Kids-Ted-Pedersen/dp/0600590...

YES!!!! That's the one! Holy crap, well done, I never thought I'd see it again! Oh man what a nostalgia trip:

"GEEK: A geek is someone who is really excited by computers and proud of it" -- this is the reason I was proud to call myself a geek from 6yo onwards :)

Really, all you need to do is make your own browser and then popularize it.

1 step ahead of you . . . but this staircase seems really long . . .