[The_Colonel]

Exactly. What people also miss that the complexity grew considerably because of the need to cover many more "edge" cases. 30 years ago, you could assume a rough display size (fixed layouts) and DPI (no scaling needed), assume ASCII / ISO-8859-1, assume that the user is able-bodied and doesn't need accessibility features, target just DOS etc.

There is also a lot of accidental complexity which you might be able to get rid of only by BC breaks, unfortunately.

[shiroiushi]

Don't forget, back in the early days of the WWW, web pages weren't mostly annoying ads. These days, this is very, very important, so we dedicate a lot of computing resources to it.