That's the original vision of hypermedia: cross-linkable book pages who can express metadata about their content while maintaining flexibility in their visual o

That's the original vision of hypermedia: cross-linkable book pages who can express metadata about their content while maintaining flexibility in their visual output. I never thought I'd say this, but HTML4, with all its billions of warts, was a pinnacle of this vision. Later developments swung too hard towards an excessively content-focused vision first (XHTML, the "semantic web"), and then swung all the way in the opposite direction, turning web protocols into dumb pipes for the general-purpose VM runtime that modern JS/HTML engines have become. Unfortunately, the industry always, always wanted this runtime. Plugins, applets, ActiveX -- people just refused to accept basic form-based interaction. DarkWeb properties accept it only because doing otherwise would be too dangerous, in the same way people don't wear jewelry when going through a ghetto.