[javajosh]

No, industry is pushing food around the plate, and has been for some time. It must have been amusing (to some) to see WebSockets arise, when TCP sockets do the same thing. Why is a new standard needed? Because firewalls block everything but port 80 and 443, and every other program that uses non-HTTP sockets has all-but-died off (with the exception of some games).

90% of the "innovation" in application programming is just an exercise in combinatorial virtualization.

(That said, it's not all bad. The browser has had a remarkable and wonderful effect on GUI application architecture that probably wouldn't have happened elsewhere.)