Comment by dredmorbius

Oh, I agree that the ship is now barely visible over the horizon.

That doesn't diminish the fact that the original intent was to have a common, freely-available mechanism for accessing, viewing, and presenting content.

(I'll probably be asked for citations. TBL has probably written on this, and Tim O'Reilly had an essay on his early response to the WWW as opposed to alternative, proprietary, systems, when O'Reilly & Associates were plotting their early course.)