The CSS Day conference may have come and gone, but Google's Chrome team is keen to keep the spirit alive with a list of what attendees felt was missing from the web.

Although Google's whiteboard asked "what's missing from the web?" the ad giant's browser gang was more interested in what engineers reckoned was missing from HTML and CSS.

After all, the original question might have prompted awkward answers such as "meaningful browser competition" or "a browsing experience free of snooping and ads."

Or even "a browser that doesn't need more memory than a small datacenter to display the words 'hello, world.'"

Topping the suggestion list is support for styling inputs followed by sorting out the visually hidden content hack once and for all. Additional input types and real random numbers were also in the list.

The Chrome team has supplied a short form (sadly hidden away behind a request for permission) to gauge what its audience feels is missing. We suspect "more AI nonsense" won't be in there.

This got us thinking. The World Wide Web turned 35 this year and has come quite some way from its inception in 1989. Back then, Tim Berners-Lee imagined a system where information could be shared. He came up with a web server and a browser. He also devised a way of formatting pages, dubbed Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and a few decades and plenty of tears and tantrums later, here we are.

Today's web is very different from that of the 1990s, with browsers an order of magnitude more complex than the likes of Mosaic.

But have things improved? And what remains to be done? What is still missing? Google has its own ideas, but here are some of ours:

• Get rid of CSS and JavaScript - what was wrong with HTML and Notepad?
• Bring back ActiveX so the younger generation can know what pain truly is.
• An AI chatbot to judge your browser history as harshly as your mother.
• An auto-reply to any perky "how can we help you?" pop-up that ensures an immediate transfer to a human (but not the authorities)
• A CSS tag that makes any website almost unreadable thanks to a plethora of pop-ups and ads. Oh wait - we have that already.

Don't forget to add your own in the comments. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/30/what_is_missing_from_web/