That's an interesting idea, but since we have to manually add each network and then it's automatically parsed from that list, at least on my end it wouldn't make any difference at all. Also one of the main features is that you can mix different networks and different threads per network, so that would be really confusing: what does this mean?
For the Edit: I searched this thorough, custom elements cannot be self-closing. And the closest thing that I found indicates that, even if they could be self-closing (void elements), then they cannot have anything inside (which is also not what I wanted).
> on my end it wouldn't make any difference at all
Sure, but attribute (or tag) names refer the the structure of the document whereas values refer to each special case; structurally (essentially) those two are the same:
which would be very readable; but since we don't have self-closing tags and we need to use hyphens in tag names, it's probably defensible to try to limit the number of tags and put as much information as possible inside attributes...
I think that's the same as with the modern <picture> and <video>. I recently tried something similar but in "traditional" html structure, but also found it a bit too verbose for my taste:
See example:
https://jsfiddle.net/franciscop/eo5v6ghc/