Many people doing the coding haven't really thought that deeply about the systems.

I'd like "web programming" to start with Vannevar Bush's As We May Think, then go to Licklider, Ted Nelson, then hypercard programming (hypertalk). Set up a BBS, a gopher site and then write HTML for NCSA Mosaic.

Read the RFCs and W3C standards, learn about Netscape's SSJS failure before touching nodejs, you know, serious academic scholarship. Maybe look at the failed TCL browser support, which has example snippets in the HTML 4 standard, understand why it didn't work, etc.

I think we'd get dramatically better results

These don't get you a job. I haven't been to interviews that care about these things.

> Agreed. Don't know why we're abandoning all the things we get for free with links just to do it all again in a SPA.

SPAs are newer, so they must be better, right? /s

The old way of doing things has always worked. Why bother with new technologies and paradigms? /s