What I would like to see is a new self-contained Web Document standard (none of the various implementations out there qualify) that mimics the core reason Markdown and other plain-text systems like AsciiDoc or LaTeX exist: To separate the writing from the presentation, but with some basic formatting as needed for most documents.

There are various self-contained document formats out there: ePub and mobi files use HTML inside, as does Microsoft's CHM. And there's a hundred zipped XML file formats out there - docx, odt, etc. But they're either write-only, proprietary or are too complicated for this purpose.

What I would want is a simple .wdoc standard file, which is either a plain-text or zip file containing a very strict subset of HTML and CSS which basically mimics the output of Markdown. (It could be called MarkUp, actually). The subset would be limited to just semantic tags and reasonable formatting, to guarantee editable HTML. Nothing dynamic or crazy. Just pure WYSIWYG.

If it was a W3C standard, there could even be a new HTML tag <doc><\doc> which wraps raw .wdoc markup in a sandbox, guaranteeing that nothing inside those wrapper tags will display anything but the allowed styles and tags. A zipped .wdoc (with images) could be included with a src attribute: <doc src="...">, with an "editable" attribute that defaults to false, but could be flipped to allow editing. Maybe an "allowed" attribute to limit formatting even further.

Like the video and audio tags, basic editor features could be supported natively, but would also allow custom editor skins like CKEditor, TinyMCE, Trix etc. But again, with standard output. This would be great for online forums like HN or reddit. In standalone apps, like Apple's Text Editor or Microsoft's WordPad, the output would be a cross platform rich text document that is readable and writable by any browser or standard .wdoc editor.

The idea is to Keep It Simple Stupid, but also provide basic cross-platform WYSIWYG editing where the simple, clean formatting is always displayed exactly like it looks when editing. I use Typora, which is a great little rich text editor that uses WebKit for the interface, and then exports Markdown, which I then process into a web page. It's insane. Let's cut out the useless middle step.

Browser engines have progressed so far since Markdown was created. It's all a matter of standardization at this point. Keep the spec simple and focused on just creating simple documents. If someone wants to use the output as a full-on web page, then it's just a matter of not using the <doc> wrapper and adding full-strength CSS, JavaScript, etc. The CommonMark spec could even be updated so that .wdoc is the standard output of a processed .md text file.

The web has tilted too far towards the dynamic app end of the spectrum, and lost its roots as a document format. I think something like this would be a great way to get back to that.

Personally I've always preferred HTML tags to markdown, primarily because I can usually understand simple HTML by looking at it, while the markdown needs a cheatsheet if I haven't been working on it recently.

I think this could probably be done as a web component if the browsers didn't implement it directly.

Plus most GUI tools produce HTML and that could probably be modified to output a more restricted format.