Pfshaw, tags are old hat. They are also just a re-hashing of the humble search keyword of olde.
The real new hat is search and all major OSes are doing this more or less correctly now. I don't recall the last time I browsed to a document.
Also worth mentioning that the concept of "documents" is itself a quickly aging hat. With some very few exceptions most documents are tied pretty closely to just one app and apps and those apps in turn can have more specific ways of handling those documents (i.e. projects, libraries etc).
The internal representation of files and programatic access is another matter - we do need a better way to segregate access and assign metadata to files. Possibly a relational file system would be the way to go, but it's not a problem that very urgently needs solving for anyone so nothing too exciting there for a while....
The MIME type is allowed to add information about the nature of the data encoded on top of the encoding. This is why we have application/xhtml+xml. It means "this is encoded using xml, and btw the parsed xml structure is xhtml".
The ideal place to handle this is (as pointed out above) content negociation - specifically as 'application/rjson+json'
Yeah it's just unfortunate. It's effectively like attempting to distribute a broken library. People simply can't use it, and even though it may have had the workings of a good solution for many people, you're just not going to get any users/contributors. shrug
I was hoping for a more technical article - the core techs for HTML5 gaming aren't quite from what I can tell. WebGL and the Audio APIs in particular seem on shaky ground for the moment... it seems there are still rather major security and performance problems to deal with.
Most worrying however is the utter lack of any non-TCP networking in the browser, not even at the specification-proposal stages. Any sort of real time multiplayer really kinda needs UDP to work efficiently. P2P is also fairly important for certain applications and is in a similar state.
Anyway, not that this means to give up hope completely, just of disappointing there aren't many visible efforts to address these issues on the horizon.
It seems to me you are missing the point of living in a modern economy - one with currency and the free exchange of goods and services ;)
Yeah, you could go to medical school and "make a difference". However, I'm going to guess (perhaps wrongly) you're not going to go into it for the shear pleasure of medical research, but rather, because you simply want to "help people".
You "want" a lot of things, day to day. Food, shelter, entertainment - the works. But you are not a farmer, nor a construction worker, nor a writer. Instead, you simply do whatever it is that gives you a reasonable tradeoff between marketability and enjoyment. You specialize. You become a programmer and make money (looky there, a lot of it!). Now you can use this money to pay others to full-fill your needs, and the people who receive your money are in turn specialists in their own field, and they can do a FAR better job at providing [food|shelter|entertainment] then you ever will.
The desire to "help people" is no different. You have a desire, and you have an ability to make money. Other people have the ability to satisfy your desire, for money. Pay them to make it happen.
If you go to medical school, you will spend ~$200,000 on it, and more importantly you will forgo MILLIONS of dollars during the time you are studying instead of doing what you're good at (startups, programming, investing, whatever). A million dollars can provide scholarships for 5 bright and promising students who each have a much higher chance of coming up with something that will "change the world" then you do. It's simply a question of efficiency.
Having said that, you do get to be involved at least to some extent. As consumers, we pay others to do the bulk of the work for us, but we still have to make some important decisions: What do we buy? Who do we hire? Who do we delegate responsibility to?
Incidentally, these are very much "investment" decisions, so your background in this area will serve you well. "Invest" in a charity program. Set one up from scratch if none of the existing ones are satisfactory. Gather motivated and qualified people. But beyond that, the best thing you can do is keep working on the things you are best at. A "Web 2.0 AJAX social network blah blah blah application" might seem petty and trivial in the greater scheme of things, but it gives you more power to change the world then most people can dream of.
Imagine you really were a medical researcher and you find out someone you love has cancer. All-nighters can only do so much. You still need to run tests, hire assistants, get software and equipment. Chances are, you won't be able to cure the disease on your own anyway. You'd feel just as impotent.
The real new hat is search and all major OSes are doing this more or less correctly now. I don't recall the last time I browsed to a document.
Also worth mentioning that the concept of "documents" is itself a quickly aging hat. With some very few exceptions most documents are tied pretty closely to just one app and apps and those apps in turn can have more specific ways of handling those documents (i.e. projects, libraries etc).
The internal representation of files and programatic access is another matter - we do need a better way to segregate access and assign metadata to files. Possibly a relational file system would be the way to go, but it's not a problem that very urgently needs solving for anyone so nothing too exciting there for a while....