A few other memories:

The Netscape 4 "missing closing table tag of doom" whereby omitting a closing table tag would cause the whole document not to render. https://www.webmasterworld.com/css/234.htm

Especially cromulent because in the absence of ANY other layout or styling control, the common mechanism were to effectively play nested games of tic-tac-toe with tables, valign=center (you never had it so good!), and if you were lucky, html-tidy on the command line for debugging.

The other "woulda coulda shoulda" is referenced here, circa 2004-ish was passing CSS for "JSS". https://levelup.gitconnected.com/a-brief-history-of-css-in-j...

...references are tough to find, but I believe Mozilla/NS attempted to push (and had a short-lived branch) for JS-based styling language. ie: body.style.background = "white" and using that as THE language for writing "stylesheets".

IIRC: Microsoft basically outright refused because they had the MS-Word people who envisioned the "CSS-as-books" universe (and had effectively infinite senior programmers to work on implementing "the cascade") while Netscape was smaller, scrappier, and more interested in an _effective_ web, not a _perfect_ web.

Very tough to find original sources for it as it was before search engines and with web-decay, sites aren't referenced.

Microsoft held the web back by at least a decade by EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish), but launched it forward (accidentally) again by forgetting that they'd implemented XHR, which allowed AJAX and the rest of the interactive techniques.

You haven't lived until you've had a convicted monopolist with rooms full of lawyers who sat in a room debating whether to arbitrarily snuff out your company by suing you into oblivion for making something compatible with their browser (once you've grown juuust big enough, and seen your peer companies destroyed after crossing a threshold). THAT's why there's such a lingering, smoldering distaste for Microsoft. They intentionally broke the interoperable internet, and intentionally smashed innovative technology with dual clubs called "legal" and "finanacial".

The other fun bits as competitor technologies in the proto-internet era were: BBS's with ANSI graphics, then "RipScript" as proto-SVG. Followed by Prodigy, which was effectively a proto-browser (with its own vector-like rendering capabilities).

Even gopher, a more text-based browsing experience, was a competitor to Mosaic 1.0, as nobody knew what the internet was supposed to be back then. Along with lynx, and links, which are conceptually awesome, except that CSS (layout vs hierarchy) and JS (interaction vs declaration) have rendered (har har) them obsolete.

Can't forget to mention AOL-server (with TCL), and NSS... Netscape Secure Server, which invented(!) SSL and for a while was the only way to serve secure traffic. Absolutely unavailable to the hobbyist, as it was a very expensive product.

There's few alternate outcomes, but open source, and monopolist financial capture have skewed the web we have now.

If I could have a magic wand, I'd shoot for 402-Payment-Required, and would be hesitant to encourage truly global (universal) aggregation of content for searching.

We're in a duality where "only google" can download and index the whole internet every day and "only facebook" has access to "the facebooks".

Facebook having a business incentive to trap event data, and merchant/for-sale data behind a login requirement is a huge loss for the open internet.

Google being "the gatekeeper" to navigating (omni-box + advertising replacing DNS) is also a loss for the open internet. Don't believe me? Try and set your browser homepage in chrome. It'll only ever open it up ONCE, when the browser opens for the first time. Not for new tabs, not for new windows, not without a janky extension.