Comment by oso2k

I think we could learn from an old (gone?!) Google+ post from Ian Hickson on what could possibly replace HTML but a lot of the criteria applies to Web/Internet as a whole (https://www.sitepoint.com/will-html-ever-be-replaced/).

   Ian Hickson (“Hixie” — WHATWG specification editor, CSS2.1 co-editor and Google’s W3C representative) recently published an interesting post on Google+. He’s occasionally contacted by people suggesting a better alternative to HTML but, in all cases, none have come close. Ian states that any technology would need to satisfy at least five objectives to displace existing web technologies:

   Be devoid of licensing requirements.
   Be vendor-neutral and accept input from everyone.
   Be device and media-neutral; it should work on PCs, TVs, mobiles, tablets, screen readers and any future hardware.
   Be content-neutral and not restrict itself to types of document or application.
   Be radically better than the existing web in every way; faster, more usable, more features, easier to develop, easier to monetize, etc.


   HTML can fail objectives two and three. Technologies such as XHTML2 and XForms only satisfied one and three. Java and Flash struggle in all areas — and I’d also add Google’s Dart to that list.

Maybe this all means there’s a place on the net for gopher, Gemini protocol, or tilde.town or ssh BBSes?