We would have been paid back in convenience and automated systems doing our work for us. But the Web was doomed when the C programmers at CERN forgot to add any structure tags. They chose shame and got war. If you thought the text was bad, just look at the pictures One of the great things about putting your photographs on the Web, besides seeing them appear in dozens of magazines worldwide without getting any payment or credit, is the fan mail. All of them.
Computer monitors have a non-linear response to the input voltage.
It is very easy to correct for this. This is known as gamma correction and is done by every Macintosh or Silicon Graphics computer. Most Unix boxes and PCs don't bother with this frill though. Professional graphic artists generally produce Web sites on Macintoshes. These poor souls had never seen an image look good on a computer screen and hence thought that standards didn't matter.