It was before your time, kid. (1) I think you underestimate the early web by quite a bit. It had a lot more awesome than you give it credit for, and if not for dot-com bubble + bust, it would have evolved in a much more thoughtful way (2) And dot-com boom and growing developers 1000x didn't need to involve Netscape, Microsoft/IE, or the W3C implosions of the time. Those were a question of management decisions and personalities.

But my original comment was 100% unambiguous: "I liked HTML2. I hated basically everything which went into HTML3 and HTML4."

Y'all responded by citing bad examples from the HTML3 / HTML4 era as examples of things going wrong...

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Note: Before I get jumped on for "kid," it's the username.