Best description of the messy state of HTML: hacking a flowing document markup language to implement GUI. Why couldn't we just get all the nice XAML/WPF containers in HTML5? Instead we get one more way of delivering streaming video. Most developers have to deal with layouts - let's focus on fixing that instead.
First of all, I'll repeat "kids these days" get-off-my-lawn speech because adoption is 100x faster than it was 10 years ago. Second of all, the point is that the standards are addressing these issues which the original commenter suggested they were not doing. Ignoring what standards bodies are actually doing before suggesting they're not doing anything and proposing some random lateral move that one happens to be familiar with is not constructive discourse.
We've seen what W3C has put out so far (XML, XSLT, XHTML...) and they do seem out of touch with the needs of developers.
All I'm hearing from you is "the gods will help us" when it would be better if W3C were smart enough to specify a sane bytecode and then let innovation run its course on top of that, instead of trying to predict our needs (which they've shown time and again they're bad at).
Stunning, just stunning. Not only do you put words in my mouth, but you also fail to acknowledge anything that's happened in the last decade of web standards (ever heard of WHATWG and HTML5?). And none of the willful ignorance you are so deftly displaying is even germane to my point. This is one of the worst replies I've received on HN, truly horribly conceived and executed.
