[ryanbrunner]

If HTML didn't have a <form> tag, then HTML and the web would still be a fairly marginal technology, and something else most likely would have existed where all these problems occurred. Maybe we'd all be complaining about how IRC is radicalizing people or something.

A repository full of static documents isn't really all that interesting. That's basically a library on a computer. Even in the very earliest days of the web, people were drawn to interactivity, whether it was early online stores, web forums, or even little interactive bits like comment sections on blogs or things like livejournal.

[krallja]

Right, this is exactly what happened to Gopher and FTP. They were good at their one job. They were replaced by HTTP.

[kiwidrew]

Originally HTML just had the <isindex> element, which was very similar to Gopher's primitive "search" functionality. Adding the <form> element with named input fields was a pretty obvious next step, and the fact that HTTP/HTML evolved to support it while Gopher did not says quite a bit about the culture behind these two protocols.