So much of the web is about downloading and formatting rows (records) of a table, the result of a database query. Can the way a user agent (browser) interacts with the server (which queries the database) be re-engineered to give the user agent much more power over the query and formatting?
This would allow websites to work with a variety of different devices and screen sizes. The simplest example is how many rows the query should return at a time. Small devices want fewer. Small devices want to format the columns differently, so it would be nice to know what the columns were, instead of a monolithic device-oblivious block of HTML and CSS. Navigation could be made easier if queries could be modified by the user agent to request sorting by an arbitrary column on the server side.
Columns can have tagged alternative data types, and it's all done. It doesn't need to solve everyone's problems.
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