I need to sit down and write a long blog post on this subject, but the tl;dr would be "The modern Web environment, from programming to browsing, is a massive ca

I need to sit down and write a long blog post on this subject, but the tl;dr would be "The modern Web environment, from programming to browsing, is a massive case of path dependence; if we were starting from scratch today, knowing all that we now know, we would not design anything like this." I have in my head a few dozen examples of what I mean, some small and some large. I won't even get into TCP/UDP which has already been argued over a thousand times. But I would point to RINA and other paradigms of remote execution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_Internetwork_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_Internetwork_Archite... But that's the large scale stuff. We can also focus on very minor stuff where a different design decision might have lead to less trouble. Take, for instance, a mouseclick. Which element on a Web page should receive that mouseclick? Well, there is a well-established hierarchy that the browsers respect, walking up the DOM, checking each element to see if it has a handler registered. It can be a royal pain if your application needs you to break out of that hierarchy, and you can end up with something buggy because this is still an area where the different browsers have slight differences. But why should any hierarchy exist by default? We could have it such that there is no hierarchy by default, the only hierarchy is that which is defined by me, the programmer. I believe this original decision (of a default hierarchy) was made because there was an assumption, in the 1990s, that each page would be hand-coded, but nowadays we have frameworks that write much of our Javascript for us, so the possibility of assigning mouseclick handlers on the basis of classes, rather than the DOM, seems like a smart choice now, but probably didn't in the 1990s. I tried to write about some of this in essays like "The problem with HTML": http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/the-problem-with-html http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/the-problem-with-html and also, "HTML is the failed GUI for TCP/IP": http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/html-is-the-failed-gui-for-tcpip http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/html-is-the-failed-gu... I'm not sure I really communicated myself very well previously, but perhaps if I focus on it, I can build the case that we've been following a path into a dark wood, and we've been so busy focusing on the path one step before us that we have perhaps not noticed that we've wandered into the lands where, in innocent days of yore, developers would have warned, "There be dragons, do not go."