I agree that the web is heading in a direction where it'll be easier to build cool websites. I think a possibly unintentional side effect of HTML as a base was

I agree that the web is heading in a direction where it'll be easier to build cool websites. I think a possibly unintentional side effect of HTML as a base was that everything was hackable. It's like everything was open source and DRM free, whether you like it or not. I think this was probably a driver of the web becoming what it did. Imagine building pagerank when you can't scrape text or hyperlinks.