Honestly I sort of miss the late-90s web/desktop integration features of Windows. There were so many different ways to hack on it. You could make an Explorer folder be a web page, of course, but it went way beyond that because there was so much magic and so little safety. You could program the browser in any language installed in your Windows Scripting Host, including VB and JS but also Perl and TCL and whatever else you wanted to use. You could invoke any Windows facility using its magic {UUID}, so you could embed the Control Panel in a web page. It was all fully integrated with the Windows database features, so depending on what databases you had installed you could achieve a lot. Access was common, if you had Office Professional, but anything you could describe to ODBC would work.