This may be a nitpick, but hopefully it's also an interesting rabbit-hole: HTML was originally contemplated as more than a method of rich text formatting. It w

This may be a nitpick, but hopefully it's also an interesting rabbit-hole: HTML was originally contemplated as more than a method of rich text formatting. It was created as a way to describe and link arbitrary media and applications. I'd recommend reading the first published proposal for (what later became known as) the World Wide Web written by Tim Berners-Lee [1]. In my reading, I see it as being intended applications as powerful as the kind we build today - at least as far as could be contemplated and described in 1989, and given the degree of abstraction with which the document as written: > "Hypertext" is a term coined in the 1950s by Ted Nelson [...], which has become popular for these systems, although it is used to embrace two different ideas. One idea[] is the concept: "Hypertext": Human-readable information linked together in an unconstrained way. The other idea [...], is of multimedia documents which include graphics, speech and video. I will not discuss this latter aspect further here, although I will use the word "Hypermedia" to indicate that one is not bound to text. An example of anticipated usage: > The data to which a link (or a hot spot) refers may be very static, or it may be temporary. In many cases at CERN information about the state of systems is changing all the time. Hypertext allows documents to be linked into "live" data so that every time the link is followed, the information is retrieved. If one sacrifices portability, it is possible so make following a link fire up a special application, so that diagnostic programs, for example, could be linked directly into the maintenance guide. Another category of use-case was web crawling, link-based document search, and other data analysis. These and other anticipated use-cases envision more than text formatting; the primary purposes of the proposal were, in my opinion, the inter-linking of information and the formal modeling of information, especially for the purpose of combining different programs or facilities into a single user experience. [1] https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html