W3c and IETF or other similar clever folks really like security stuff and do lots of clever things to make us safer. So why couldn't we create a http browser/server authentication method that has something closer to a nonce-based challenge/response mechanism? If it were standardized, the browsers could even do some clever hashing of some peer addresses or other things that we think should be static. All of the browsers could still present a "username/password" field that looks remarkably similar to existing forms but never reveals the plaintext password to the peer.
As long as I could type my password into other browsers on other computers and still get the same result, it seems like it's moving things forward. It would be opt-in, traditional username/password forms would continue to live on for decades to follow.
So what am I missing? Presumably something like this was considered and ruled out?
EDIT: yes, of course, I forgot about the existing HTTP authentication mechanism(s) in RFC 2069. I don't know why it never caught on but the fact that the browser uses modal dialogues for these means a significantly different context/user experience.