There's a debate on the purpose of it. They problem is we took our interlinked document space and built thin client applications on it. Our crosslinked thought

There's a debate on the purpose of it. They problem is we took our interlinked document space and built thin client applications on it. Our crosslinked thoughtworld for intermingling intellects in practice is mostly an entertainment and shopping platform. Really they probably should have split off when it was young ... Replacing HTML with something for the original lofty goals and leave the html/css/js triumvirate for the mainstream use we all see now. Then there becomes no pretext that there's any intellectual, educational, or documentarian use for the web because there'd be something else, let's call it the Yeb for those purposes. It'd get two way linking, ontological markup, a WAIS like querying system (where the document author explicitly sets the search up separately from the document), etc. But that never happened and the web has way too much inertia to successfully fork it at such a fundamental level without a monumental multi-year effort so here we are with one set of standards trying to serve all masters at once by layering stuff on top of each other, building a bigger russian nesting doll to stuff our existing web into (could you imagine if say jstor or citeseer required a "yeb browser" because it served content that was fundamentally incompatible with the web standards. Could have taken off in 1995 but not now) The only engineering results those conditions ever produce is complexity since it inherently, by design, lacks the focus to remove it.