It should be some another ways to improve the web.

[digital-cosmos]

To add more semantic to tags is correct decision. "class" attribute use very often to markup documents. But I think that idea to ressurrect this old fashioned standart (HTML) to life in future is not so good. This technology was good in 80s, but now it's just an constraint that makes developers limit their possibilities to make cool apps, because a stack for develop web application is just go out of date.

Yes, you try to make in modern, to allow use in to build nice looking pages, but it's some delusion. It's not data presentaion language (because we still have the tags that works as visual layout elements, with not too much of semanics) and it's not a visual markup one (because it lacks of some sort of tags to define containers, grids and other stuff required to build layouts - we just need use CSS for that instead build-in HTML capabilities). So, what is it so it doesn't solve problems to represent data or to markup difficult page layouts?

I think that the better way is to add some safe protocol to load web-apps images (application) published as byte code to VM sandbox in the browser (by URI) and then execute it. So we can use many an many ways to build this byte-code in way, that developer decide is the best for him. We could use any languages (prodcedural, functional or declarative ones) to publish web-apps for this VM. No more limits to designers, programmers and users to improve web in way they want. No more large-scale consortiums to decide what tags are good for us. Just rewrite any compiler to build required byte-codes and use it to draw pixels or text-blocks or games, on the screen....

I hope that backward compatibility and other "good" features won't make developers to stay on place for decades.

[cshaa]

That's not the way the evolution goes.
It's very important to stay backwards compatible at least in the terms of keeping the same language. I can't imagine all the browser vendors creating another standard that is completely different from HTML and all of them agreeing on it. Look at PNaCL – it just won't happen.
And about that thing with being neither visual nor very good at semantics: HTML is trying very hard to become a strictly semantic and with Microformats2 it's doing a great job. There's a lot to improve but it's not as bad as it used to be.
Talking about the VM: there's a good reason for making HTML a markup language – so no, you won't be allowed to use functional, procedural or whatever programming, because HTML is not a programming language. However you can compile nearly any language to JavaScript so idk where's the problem. As another point, the ability to create a webpage in the notepad is the key feature that brings us new developers, which is eg. why is JavaScript so popular.

So no, this probably won't happen. But keep dreaming and inventing new technologies, maybe you'll find a solution that no one has found before one day. Good luck.