This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

Freedombox foundation is trying to achieve the same end result.

"CSS could have used a table-like layout model that makes it easy to arrange s into rows and columns, allowing a smooth upgrade from people who were using the tag."

Like this? http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/tables.html

Good background from the bitcoin people:

"A number of Byzantine Generals each have a computer and want to attack the King's wi-fi by brute forcing the password, which they've learned is a certain number of characters in length. Once they stimulate the network to generate a packet, they must crack the password within a limited time to break in and erase the logs, lest they be discovered. They only have enough CPU power to crack it fast enough if a majority of them attack at the same time.

They don't particularly care when the attack will be, just that they agree. It has been decided that anyone who feels like it will announce an attack time, which we'll call the "plan", and whatever plan is heard first will be the official plan. The problem is that the network is not instantaneous, and if two generals announce different plans at close to the same time, some may hear one first and others hear the other first.

They use a proof-of-work chain to solve the problem. Once each general receives whatever plan he hears first, he sets his computer to solve a difficult hash-based proof-of-work problem that includes the plan in its hash. The proof-of-work is difficult enough that with all of them working at once, it's expected to take 10 minutes before one of them finds a solution and broadcasts it to the network. Once received, everyone adjusts the hash in their proof-of-work computation to include the first solution, so that when they find the next proof-of-work, it chains after the first one. If anyone was working on a different plan, they switch to this one, because its proof-of-work chain is now longer.

After about two hours, the plan should be hashed by a chain of 12 proofs-of-work. Every general, just by verifying the difficulty of the proof-of-work chain, can estimate how much parallel CPU power per hour was expended on it and see that it must have required the majority of the computers to produce in the allotted time. At the least, most of them had to have seen the plan, since the proof-of-work is proof that they worked on it. If the CPU power exhibited by the proof-of-work is sufficient to crack the password, they can safely attack at the agreed time."

http://www.bitcoin.org/byzantine.html

A lot like that, yes, but that was not introduced until CSS2 which is so big and complex that they've spent almost 15 years correcting it (CSS 2.1 keeps bouncing back and forth between "Working Draft" and "Candidate Recommendation").

Despite being first defined in CSS2 (1998) CSS tables were not supported in IE for 10 years (IE8, 2009), and while some of the blame for this is surely Microsoft's, with a standard as big and complex as CSS it's hard to expect implementations to get it right for a long time.

To avoid this disaster CSS3 is "modular" and currently has over 40 modules defined! This is madness. The more complicated things get, the more difficult it is to bring the web to new devices or to innovate in the browser space.

I looked into CSS tables a bit more, and this seems to be how you'd write the above:

    
    .table { display: table; width: 100%; }
    .tr    { display: table-row; }
    .left-column { display: table-cell; width: 200px; }
    .middle-column { display: table-cell; }
    .right-column { display: table-cell; width: 200px; }
    
    
      Fixed left column.
      Liquid center column.
      Fixed right column.
    

This is definitely a huge improvement over the CSS box model. If this had been available in practice 10 years ago, I probably wouldn't be complaining about it now. But I still think it is because CSS2 is so big, complicated, and had so many errors that it wasn't implemented for so long.