Making a more read/annotate/write web is near and dear to my heart. There's a lot I find admirable - noble about pages like Hyperclay!
But also, it's a distinctly different answer for each page to build its own toolkit for the user (Hyperclay) vs TBL's read-write web. The user-agent ought, imo, afford standard tools that are going to work across web pages, that extend the user agency whatever site they are visiting.
Yes, I agree. My dream would be to one day work on a browser and integrate Hyperclay into it. I believe web apps have been around long enough as a core web technology that browsers should ship with a local web host, knowledge of what a user and user account is, and the ability to persist to disk whatever the user chooses.
In a similar vein, it looks like there is a working group for linked web storage at:
https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/lws/
That would likely have some overlap.
If you were to have an accepted w3c proposal and working implementation in local browser forks, you could potentially chat with the browser teams to add the experimental feature first through a flag users would manually have to turn on, and then later potentially it could get integrated.
> Making a more read/annotate/write web is near and dear to my heart
Isn't that basically Wikipedia? I can't imagine a much simpler system that could work at modern web scale.
I think the scale difference is the whole point. Wikipedia has billions of active users, while these Hyperclay-style persistent documents have only a few.
Saying "we don't need this because Wikipedia already solved it" is kind of like saying in 1976: "Nobody needs the Apple II, we already have IBM mainframes that have solved every useful problem in computing much better."