...perl...cleaner code...

I've always loved these thought experiments, carving up the world into new and improved political alignments. This stemmed from encountering C. Etzel Pearcy's proposed 38 State map published in the 1975 People's Almanac; his notions of a better functioning nation arising from a more equitable distribution of state alignments really had an impact on me, growing up as I did on the mostly barren east side of Oregon, and listening to my elders constantly complaining about getting shafted via taxes by the moneygrubbers in Portland/Salem/Eugene. The Almanac also featured another new map of the US, with 22 states I think; can't find any info about it at the moment though.

Also an interesting read was Joel Garreau's book The Nine Nations of North America, which was more about the cultural mass regions that make up the continent.

More like,"Hi there! This is Bippy, your personal interactive video helper! I see you have your pants off! Would you like me to open a Spice subscription for you? I already have all of your personal and billing information available, I just need your verbal acknowledgement."

What exactly would you consider a better technology?

Pure HTML is nothing more than an SGML derivative, like XML, and for the use of formatting, is not bad. CSS, as a way of taking some of the ambiguity and potential for different interpretations on formatting, is also not bad. JavaScript... OK, yeah, this language could be better. It has a lot of nifty features that can do more harm than good, and is missing one or two nice features (like good type identification, rather than prototype checking, which can have quirks in different browsers).

Everything else is a non-standard and/or proprietary add-on.

Can you think of a better alternative out there that fulfills all the same needs? About the only thing I can think of doing to improve it is replace JavaScript with python (mostly to fix the missing features), Java or C# - and then tweak CSS and HTML a bit to add a few extra features.

By the way, the needs of HTML, as far as I can observe: To present data on a wide variety of systems, where presenting the data accurately is more important than minor (and even major) variances in formatting, as may be called for by the platform presenting the document(s).

Really? Most fundamental medical advances are created in academia, mostly with public money. Many companies just take the relatively small step to a commercial product. William H. Oldendorf would have done his pioneering work on the CAT scan, whether there was a patent system or not. Indeed, looking at his wikipedia biography, he worked in public institutions for most of his life.

There are industries where a severely limited patent system makes sense. Any industry that's too tightly regulated by government, so that barrier to entry is impossible, like pharma or telecom. Of course you could solve the same problem by pealing back the red tape as well. Competition in the free and open market is the only thing that truly breeds innovation. No free market, no competition. It's easy.

I could see that working for mystery novels...

No you don't. That's Keynesian nonsense. Corporations that are poorly managed need to go bankrupt and the burden should not be placed on the tax payers. Yes, some people will lose their jobs. That's called life, sometimes it happens. The worst thing you can do is paper over it just to make everyone happy. Another company that is better managed will move in to fill the void, they always do. Now that executives of major corporations know they can rely on Uncle Sam to bail them out for making big mistakes (and they won't even go to jail if they commit massive fraud like the banking scandals of the last decade), there is no incentive for them to not take big gambles and otherwise behave more recklessly than they would if there were actual consequences.