You can certainly make something with it, but I can't imagine most people finding a use for it.
Modern Internet is 45% appearances and 50% search traffic optimizations. For better or worse we lost all usable registries of websites, we lost appearance-less and traffic considerations-less websites. Information-focused Web is pretty much dead.
Maybe these ideas did not scale and did not monetize that well, but we will never really know what information-focused version of Internet would have looked like because evolution took it elsewhere. Unless we try building another one with different principles and limitations at the core.
it's as if nothing was learned from the XHTML debacle
This is what XHTML was, and it was a complete disaster. There's a reason almost nobody serves XHTML with the application/xhtml+xml MIME type, and that reason is that getting a “parser error” (this is what browsers still do! try it!) is always worse than getting a page that 99% works.[0] I strongly believe that rejecting the robustness principle is a fatal mistake for a web-replacement project. The fact that horribly broken old sites can stay online and stay readable is a huge part of the web's value. Without that, it's not really “the web”, spiritually or otherwise.
[0] It's particularly “cool” how they simply do not work in the Internet Archive's Wayback machine. The page can be retrieved, but nobody can read it.
oh and also https://xkcd.com/927/
thealistra•26m ago