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> The web was designed to publish documents, it was never intended to build applications. I find that repeated a lot, but to me, it's somewhere between an overstatement and a misconception. Sure, the early web wasn't anywhere near the versatility of what we have today, and interactivity was extremely limited (and as you say, is still more complex than it ought to be). But the semantics of HTTP+HTML, from the early days, allowed for application development. If all we had had were <p>, <h1>, <aside> and GET, sure, documents it is. But we had forms and POST and everything you need to make a CRUD application from the early 90s. It was pretty basic, but so was support for documents (tell Desktop Publishing people that HTML in the 90s was good for documents, and they're not likely to agree much). Just as one example, what is this, of not an application: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/pizzanet/ |
Further, to quote Tim Berners-Lee directly on his intention when he created the first version of the WWW (emphasis mine):
"Creating the web was really an act of desperation, because the situation without it was very difficult when I was working at CERN later. Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together. It was a step of generalising, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system." — Tim Berners-Lee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#Career_and_res...
edit: cleaned up formatting and attributed emphasis.