They didn't implement it as anything resembling a system widget. What every web developer wanted from 1997 on was the common nav bar of the era: a set of dropd

They didn't implement it as anything resembling a system widget. What every web developer wanted from 1997 on was the common nav bar of the era: a set of dropdown menus that more or less behaved like the native dropdowns every other piece of software on the machine had. What we got was a <ul> with a funny name, so you had to at least toss a bunch of CSS at it to remotely resemble a "menu", and if it was on something like IE, also JavaScript to breathe it to life. I always believed if we had added a few more native-widget tags in the 1990s anything-goes era (a <menu> that looked the part, <td sortable="type">, maybe <richtext>, an <include> that was better than iframes), we could have had web based apps earlier, less Javascript to provide trivial functionality, and steered the web into a direction where the north star was the look, feel, and standards of native software. If quality web apps followed the OS Human Interface Guidelines and looked and active as native as possible, it would have created a completely different evolutionary environment. Would we end up prioritizing things like structured data because standard design practices were already displaying things in familiar structured widgets?