Re: Memories!
You must not remember the web of the late 90's and early 00's, which began with rampant abuse of HTML tables, iframes, and early vendor-specific CSS and other non-standard styling methods. And flash/shockwave, java applets, and other plugins that replicated a desktop UI to a browser.
It wouldn't really hit until 2005 or so that this was anti-everything and wouldn't be until ~2010ish that the web started really getting broadly on board with the idea. The increasingly rickety teetering tower of junk piled on top of the web is most likely what brought the W3C back to relevance, as well, as more big players decided they needed to invest in a better way forward, lest Flash take over the world.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
