[jemfinch]

Yes, it's hard. Unnecessarily hard, which is why I hate when I have to do it.

The complexity of web development is not intrinsic to the problem, but an extrinsic reality imposed by widely differing implementations of a number of overengineered technologies.

[jordanlev]

Well, if you expand your definition of "the problem" to "how do we enable people all over the world to interact with this information on any computing platform over an untrustworthy connection running on low-end hardware", then I think the chaos and technology soup is a little more necessary to things being where they're at now. So no, it's not technically necessary, but politically/economically it is.