But hopefully the result will be evolution without fragmentation. I chuckled thinking about the UPS truck. I might then have been tempted to make an HTTP message more like and XML document than an email message. But then those decisions were partly political, to seep in people who knew the existing formats. I use the Web all the time at work - the w3c team just lives on it.
Nothing is discussed unless it or a team copy of it is on the web.
I have one email account and try to scan it all but don't always succeed. I use a lot of automatica filtering of mail into mailboxes. We are celebrating the 30th anniversary fo the Internet - and the 10th of the Web. America Online is probably the most powerful commercial force in cyberspace, yet it is not Web-based. And life can be faily weird, before the WWW or after.