The web is many things, but it is _not_ beautiful. It is a mess. It happened by accident, evolved beyond anyone's control and is now a beast loose upon the wor

The web is many things, but it is _not_ beautiful. It is a mess. It happened by accident, evolved beyond anyone's control and is now a beast loose upon the world. Unlovely in the extreme. And it does _not_ run everywhere. With lots of work, you can make it run a lot of places; enough to be worth the effort. It is certainly useful, but not _nearly_ as useful as it could be. Ted Nelson, who created the term hypertext, famously said, "HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT-- ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management." While politically I myself am very much in favor of open standards, for reasons I shouldn't have to explain _here_, I'm also vastly disappointed in the quality of most of the results, if from no other viewpoint than a human factors one. Like the talking dog, proponents seem happy that it talks (works) at all, and don't seem nearly concerned enough about what it's saying...