Web dev never moved faster than IE during the early 00s. MSFT dropped the ball. They also pushed it up the hill first.

Yes they did you ate that long to innovate in an evolutionary environment and have Steve ballmer running around yelling we won the web and throwing chairs was quite repulsive. That and tying everything to a single OS interoperability what? A practice now ubiquitous hello Google.

Active Desktop could kill today, GPT as Start Menu search if that’s your thing. Linux customization? Think folders that are each HTML & JS app having Windows API access. I’d switch in a heartbeat. Bygone era, but not quickly forgotten.

How about some simple HTML a little bit of style and some Perl CGI for forms. Too soon? ;-)

There’s something thrilling to see we’ll-placed gifs in a table look beautiful in Opera 9, Chrome 1, IE 5.5 & pocket. A service that repackages the web into tables could take hold easily. Older consoles, phones outside US & EU. Really, you’re right, forms get us 90% there.

You know several people have said this night and this is so fascinating to me because I wonder why is that we just miss that we're doing things he kept it simple and clean or is it because today's methods are getting more and more complex in css?

That’s the question to answer. If the yesterday’s tools for building websites were shown off today: Would newer developers say, “that’s much easier” or “wow, you had it much harder”