I think that a new paradigm should try to achieve the following: 1) Be based on code that can be machine interpreted and used afterwards in computations. Maybe this will require a more standardized way of writing math (like the apl that was suggested). 2) Be based on source code that is not cluttered and can be read easily by a human (maybe like markdown) 3) Most important of all: Formatting should be a completely independent layer. My original equations should have nothing more than math, it should be the renderer's business of how to present it to the consumer (webpage, pdf or whatever). It should be very easy for example to change the alignment of your equations a-posteriori without messing with the equations themselves.