Html could have been that - or better, it was at first - but instead of creating a more specialized solution for running rich apps we decided to exploit html.

Html could have been that - or better, it was at first - but instead of creating a more specialized solution for running rich apps we decided to exploit html. Right now we are in what I'd call the worse of both worlds, because we rely on html to do things it wasn't designed to, and there's no longer purity in any html out in the wild.