Thinking about this and the Gemini protocol, it seems to me that HTML has become too user-hostile, or at least it gives too much rope for site developers to hang users.
The way I'd solve this problem would be to develop a new file format that was similar to Markdown but contained semantic elements (eg "this image is relevant to this bit of text", or "this text explains that text".
This would be rendered into HTML by a browser extension so the browser could display it, which would help keep authors honest (because if the server renders it, we're just using HTML again).
The format would contain no styling information at all, apart from the semantic tags, so styling would be entirely on the client. You could pick the way you wanted your articles to look, which would probably be different per device.
This sounds a bit like epub and would probably be great for book reader devices as well, while being extremely light to load because there isn't much you can do with it.
Actually, HTML hasn't changed much for many years now. Which is kindof the problem - everything around it (mostly CSS, and also JS) had to change ad absurdum to exercise HTML into a scene graph for web apps.
It's not like W3C and others hadn't tried to renovate HTML - that's what W3C's XML initiative was about in 1998, with a generic namespacing mechanism in anticipation of a wealth of new vocabularies (of which SVG and MathML, but not XHTML made it).
I'd argue W3C people were so wound up in XML and "enterprise" tech for like ten years that the web stack was unprepared when the iPhone with requirements for mobile sites came around, and W3C became an easy target to take HTML away from.
Mentioning this to warn against inventing new meta "formats" all the time - everything needed for HTML was already in existence before 1986 when SGML (on which HTML is based) was published.
Including markdown and custom shortform syntax. Large parts of markdown can be specified using SGML shortref, yielding a shortform syntax that expands to HTML proper, capturing exactly the way markdown was originally specified.
Tech people love throwing technology at social problems.
Plain HTML is great for documents. It’s just the browsers‘ failure to render it nicely that makes authors feel like it’s necessary to style to make it presentable.
"The way I'd solve this problem would be to develop a new file format that was similar to Markdown but contained semantic elements (eg "this image is relevant to this bit of text", or "this text explains that text"."
It sounds like you're reinventing the Semantic Web:
The look of HTML pages used to be up to the end user, W3C should never have allowed non-logical HTML and other ways of breaking design. When a new standard is invented as a remedy, it will suffer the same fate as HTML as long as this problem is not taken care of. AFAIK, the way to take care of it is to enforce semantic markup in all aspects of a page and leave the rest to the end user. The browser should know things like "this is a large list of strings that the user can choose", "this is an image with the following description", maybe even author-intended display preferences, but not more than that.
I think the overall best solution would be to switch from a layout language to a programming language where each program manages special input and output variables that are marked semantically and given display and layout hints. No HTML, no CSS, just programs on a virtual "semantic display" with input and output of data to the user.
The way I'd solve this problem would be to develop a new file format that was similar to Markdown but contained semantic elements (eg "this image is relevant to this bit of text", or "this text explains that text".
This would be rendered into HTML by a browser extension so the browser could display it, which would help keep authors honest (because if the server renders it, we're just using HTML again).
The format would contain no styling information at all, apart from the semantic tags, so styling would be entirely on the client. You could pick the way you wanted your articles to look, which would probably be different per device.
This sounds a bit like epub and would probably be great for book reader devices as well, while being extremely light to load because there isn't much you can do with it.