the- rapists who pre- ached on wee- knights.
whoever thinks that browser development has stalled, that there are no new features to be developed and all to be done is bug fixing should hold on for a minute – or at least take another look at what donald knuth has achieved with tex.
no kidding intended, what browsers still can learn from knuth's typesetting software is what a readable and well-formed text layout can and should look like.
one key to this is hyphenation.
there's still the challenge to implement a meaningful (semi-automatic) hyphenation mechanism in the browsers. instead of slowly ignoring tags like <wbr/> we should think about how html could support hyphenation by providing even more advanced features.
soft hyphens, ­ or &173; already defined in html 3.2, could be a good start. why not make them working as defined in html 4?
further developments involve advanced text flow control, exact letter positioning and a more meaningful way to apply typesetting styles (the current css features work, but still are ridiculously ponderous).
btw. what about mathematical equations? i wonder why there hasn't been an academic riot against this ugly way of publishing scientific symbols and formulas as images on the web, yet... the above html+ document dates back to 1993 and tex can do this very well since the 1980s, too.
one could also consider the curse of overdosed, flashy "blinkenlights" features in web design as a result of the designers' exodus to multimedi(ev)al exile because they are frustrated by html's lack of typographic support (and i am not thinking of fontmania at all).
maybe such typophile browser capabilities would tempt designers at least a little bit to turn their backs on artificial, user-unfriendly interfaces and face the old challenge of creating excellence in information design again.
ceterum censeo: the web is a text-based medium.