> I hope one day we will have some kind of standardized markup language that allows presenting text in a browser in a plug and play way… text/plain for the most basic stuff would do, and we could add some kind of tags to have stuff like italic / bold parts and titles, and links, too.

You should mark this as sarcasm or some young "data architects" will not understand your point here.

This reminds me of a comment from StavrosK 4 months ago:

"I will never stoop so low as to telegraph my own joke."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19508172 (funny discussion by the way - that was when Cisco "fixed" a vulnerability by blocking curl's user agent).

This "markup language" idea sounds intriguing. Perhaps we should form a committee to design it, and then a consortium to standardize it. It could even be promulgated World Wide!

I think we're going to need styles too, so that individual roles (like headings and paragraphs) don't have to constantly restate their font info.

But it's absolutely essential that the styling language not be turing equivalent! That would be a nightmare. So it must have a minimalist design.

Please add simple scripting for form validation.

Good idea. Scheme would be a good choice.

You mean you want to run arbitrary code on a user's computer behind their back? Sounds terrible.

Forming the committee does not need script validation.

We could run the code in a chroot environment that simulates the whole machine. It would be a safe place to play. We could call it something cute like "sandbox." Naturally it would be resource limited so code couldn't consume all your memory or CPU cycles. That would be completely under user control. People might want code to show ads, but the user could limit them to 100 ms of load time, 5 seconds of wall clock time, and no more than 10% of the screen.

What browser would go to great lengths to implement such a sandbox to run a code which the user does not care about and for which they have no use anyway?

People put "no ads" signs on their mail boxes. Do you really think they'd see such a thing as a feature? Crazy stuff, no browser on their right mind would shoot themselves such a bullet in the foot. People would immediately turn to the competition, should such a thing happen.

What next? Document viewers weighting several megabytes? Containing a full-fledged garbage collector?

I'd say let's keep things simple. People like simplicity, and stuff that works and that does not freeze or crash every other hour.