| The problem with any new initiative in this space is that it enters a field that is more than well populated. It doesn't matter if existing solutions are less than perfect. Its like walking into a historic European city that has architecture going back millennia and arguing for a great new building design. Greenfield space is scarce and people will not just demolish old structures to try something new. They need to sense overwhelming advantage. The analogy gives some hints as to what needs to happen for a new approach to take hold. In building construction, massively better use of space was one example: For better or worse, use of steel and reinforced concrete opened the vertical dimension and the rest is history. Is there such an unexplored dimension that could entice people into yet another document format to "improve" on ascii, restructuredText, wikitext, markdown, tex/latex, asciidoc, html etc. etc.? The stock answer is some sort of semantic hypertext infrastructure. The original vision is still unfulfilled. If we assume that the walled gardens of today are just a bad nightmare that will pass away, in a re-decentralized web one would need modern, user-friendly and empowering document writing infrastructure. But there might be other dimensions that would elevate document writing and sharing to new heights. The beauty of innovation is that it is not bound by conventional rules and pre-existing wisdom. |
You need efficient documents formats, which means formats that don't try to do everything, which means that you have to segregate different document types in different files - e.g. tables in some standard spreadsheet format - in contrast to HTML that tries to do tables, graphic (SVG), etc. on its own.
Separating each thing in their own file lets the user choose which programs they want to view/manipulate documents (rather that the one-size-fits-all browser), help with distribution across the network, and help with low storage/low bandwidth situations (or do more with the hardware we have right now).
So from my perspective, the answer is negative: there's nothing new to invent. Specialize and refine what was already invented.