> There's a real tention between "application" and "document system". Not really. The web implements a "document as application" or "living document" model. Si

> There's a real tention between "application" and "document system". Not really. The web implements a "document as application" or "living document" model. Since the most rudimentary software is just printing static text (and static graphics) you get quite a bit of mileage with just HTML & CSS. The web scales nicely from this to fully interactive applications, and I think some of the tension you are perceiving comes from the fact it's easy to disable or override features built into to the browse, and often developers find a way to do something novel, and in doing so, break thinks like the clipboard.