The evolution of the web, and a eulogy for XHTML2
> This is unsurprising given the total willingness and business incentive of major players such as Google to drive the applications use case and their comparative disinterest in the semantic hypertext use case<p>Indeed, I am consistently surprised at the document-display features that are still missing from web browsers that are increasingly preoccupied with serving as application runtimes.<p>The web was originally envisioned as a platform for scientists to share documents, but thanks to Google dropping MathML, there's still no cross-browser, non-kludge way to display math.<p>Browsers still can't justify text properly. Even with hyphenation (which iirc is still a problem in Chrome), the greedy algorithm used for splitting text across lines still results in too much space between words when justified.<p>There seems to be a complete lack of interest in Paged Media support, so if you want your web-page to be printable with nice formatting, you basically need to provide it as a PDF.<p>I've gotten to the point where I'm often happier to read something in-browser as a PDF than as a web-page. Sure, it can't reflow properly, but at least it won't have a 2-inch sticky header and make XHR requests to 10 different domains. My vision-impaired father reports that his text-to-speech software now works better with PDFs than with real web-pages. This is insanity.