You are changing the topic with photoshop and VS, I or no one else on this thread claimed they should be web apps. PDF like say word and excel documents can be

You are changing the topic with photoshop and VS, I or no one else on this thread claimed they should be web apps. PDF like say word and excel documents can be made to write applications. With classic html, you can do similar things as with PDF but it was used to write anything from IRC clients, school exams, games and a lot more. Like PDF, it contained support for scripts to allow applications not mere documents to be implemented but unlike PDF it was especially made for the web. People did implement full fledged apps in plain html powered by powerful server side languages like php or jsp. The trend of doing a lot of heavy lifting in clients is fairly modern after clients were able to handle such workloads and internet speeds were not a deterrent. For clienr capabilities of the time, html was very much meant to implement apps in the browser with all the heavi lifiting done on the server side because pentium 1 with 500mb ram,dialup and windows 98 can't do modern types of apps even with flash well.