The web that we build for today is a rich, almost entirely backwards-compatible stew of nearly two decades of browser development and standards work, resulting in a triumvirate of very different languages that need to come together in order to make a web application happen: HTML + CSS + JS. Two of them are weak, data-description languages, one is strong and general-purpose. You have to learn all three, and learn about the quirks and sunspots accumulated over the years.

So, as a thought experiment, imagine what it would be like to work with a single language that was general-purpose, but also excellent at describing data, especially the trees (HTML) and property lists (CSS) that make up web documents. Perhaps it knows about the intended lifecycle of your HTML in a more structured way. Perhaps other flatly descriptive parts of your application can be merged with the "flat" styling of your CSS descriptions. Perhaps the idea of "binding" is built-in.

After that, there's technical hoopla. If it's interpreted in the browser, you need to be light and parse quickly, you need to be able to "JIT" chunks of code into optimized JavaScript when necessary, and you need to be able to dynamically generate the appropriate source maps, so that it feels closer to a seamless experience.

Is such a unifying language possible? I don't know. But imagine how much more fun it might be to work with — and more importantly, how much more accessible it could be for folks just getting started.

But when there is something to show, y'all will be the first to know...