Comment by timewizard

The modern web has successfully liberated applications from mostly vendor locked OS environments into mostly agnostic browser environments. I think this has been a good thing.

Otherwise, with just CSS and HTML, you'd have a web strictly dedicated to publishing. A read only experience curated by those who are willing to invest the time and tooling into being a publisher.

Even then with the advent of RSS and other data exchange formats it's arguable we didn't even need that part of the web. It would be far better for publishing to deliver headlines and summaries via RSS and then allow me to purchase full content and issues digitally.

I think the bigger complication in the creation of the web was the complete lack of payment systems and user trust in entering their payment information into these platforms. So only the large well moneyed entities like advertisers were willing to absorb that risk and built out the platform. Instead of us conveniently and safely paying creators for content we now have aggressive advertisers who litter the web so publishers can shake pennies out of the CPM tree.