Comment by ebiester

They were wrong about one thing: tooling matters.

The XHTML/XML/XSLT tooling was bad, and XSLT was hard to reason about. That meant that amateurs had no way to learn it, and those amateurs went to school and became the workforce.

The web became a winner because it was easy to get something working. And then Google made it a mission to make great developer tools in everyone's hands for free.

I think in 2026 we could build the tooling around a better experience, but it would require thinking about the developer experience first.