I recently realized how often web developers defending the status quo have internalized a circular reasoning regarding "what the Internet is for". So the Internet is for web applications now, so we need to have all that stupid crap in CSS and dump metric tons of JavaScript on everyone. But if you suggest that maybe we should then drop the content/layout "separation" and make CSS actually nice to work with, the same people will tell you that "web is for documents", so what we have now is good.

I'm beginning to wonder if we shouldn't split the Internet into two - one for cloud apps and another for content - and design the tech stacks accordingly.