But that was where Netscape, a commercial company, and others wanted to take the web. The original idea of the web was to share simple marked up documents, not applications. The image tag was even hotly debated when it was first introduced.

As for figuring out how to turn the web into an app platform, Netscape and Sun might have gotten farther in the 90s if it wasn't for Microsoft. There used to be a saying in the 2000s that MS held back technology for a decade.