I've been on and off thinking about this problem for years. Very excited to see an ecosystem popping up. But I wonder, why JSON if the web is already built on

I've been on and off thinking about this problem for years. Very excited to see an ecosystem popping up. But I wonder, why JSON if the web is already built on HTML documents? Is it possible to just store our data in a web of authenticated html documents and have the protocol be built on that? Are there other open standards we can leverage to reduce the amount of new infra / protocols? I wonder if there's a less complex "good enough" mvp version.