Innovation can happen when you start thinking out of the box. That doesn't mean it does happen. I don't find much about "webdev" to be terribly innovative. In many ways it is a large step backwards or sideways.

I agree that from a technology standpoint, the web development field is absolutely atrocious—at all levels. On the server side, broken languages control vast swaths of marketshare, and the client side has plenty of its own issues.

From the user's perspective, however, there's been a ton of innovation, and they (usually) don't know/care that most applications are built on houses of cards.

Out of curiosity what broken languages in particular are you referring to? I'm also somewhat curious at to what language(s) you use.

I really should have made that singular—I was referring to PHP.

Historically, my language of choice for the server-side has been Java (I interned at an IBM lab that was involved in the creation of Eclipse, so I used it a lot at the start of my career). More recently, I've been dabbling in Ruby, and I'd also like to give Scala and Go a try.

This. Plus, sure, WWW was probably meant for sharing content, but HTML/JS is a front-end standard not necessarily tied with WWW.

More specifically, innovation happens when innovators push the limits of existing technologies (even if they're bad or not intended for that use) rather than waiting for the platform to catch up.

For most of its history, HTML has been codifying usage rather than prescribing it. The one major exception—XHTML—was never widely adopted, partly for this reason.