Gagnon noted that one traditional difficulty with database design has involved making a wide variety of hardware and software work together. This systemic issue forced him to implement a robust, simple design. System interoperability may be far more important in the long term than the actual features and functions you get. I've preached this for a long time. Gagnon used garden-variety software, eliminating licensing fees.
Most customers do have PCs.
If they don't, we provide them. It's that important that we have good data coming in to serve that customer base. In other words, Gagnon could not assume that his users had new or fancy modems or access to more futuristic devices for cruising the information superhighway. Partly because of that limitation, his programmers could not get too detailed. They restricted themselves to bare-bones HTML, eschewing more powerful but less universal alternatives.