It sounds like we agree about the good parts of HTML.

> There has never been a better markup language.

> It has been the best thing for accessibility we ever came up with.

I couldn't help but notice your use of the past tense in both sentences above. Is it the best thing we can come up with, looking toward the future?

I argue we can do better, while celebrating and building off of what's great about the past & present.[0]

[0] https://docs.pax.dev/intro-priorities-and-prior-art/#:~:text...

Oh, yet another ActiveX.

Closer to "yet another Flash," but 100% open source, and no browser plugin thanks to WebAssembly

How about the same old flash emulated in wasm, so no plugin.

https://ruffle.rs/

Use those same great adobe tools in a vm.

I can imagine no better way for readability and accessibility than a text-first representation of content, which is what HTML is. I will even argue that having the modern web emerge from a text-content first approach is the best thing that could have happened to us.

All other content representation infrastructures that weren't text first, like java applets or flash died because they were no match for HTML.

Agreed! Markup-as-content-backbone is one of many things HTML/CSS do extremely well, and I agree not building around something like this was a major weakness of Flash.

Silverlight sought to do this with XAML, but it had other problems (required a plugin right as plugins were on their way out; CLR was a huge dependency; too locked down and proprietary under Ballmer leadership)

Can you imagine a text-first content representation, which is visually editable with the UX of a vector design tool? This is the rabbit hole that drives our work on Pax.