HTML was complete *it until CSS, flex box, grid, web components, etc. are invented, so users are escaped to Flash, ActiveX, and Java applets.
It still smells, because I cannot load my own web components library or/and my own CSS for use on all sites, so every site MUST reinvent wheel.
When Firefox for Linux used native GTK+ UI elements in web pages, with user theme applied, every web page looked like native applications. It was excellent. Then this feature was cut, because "every page must have the same look on every device/OS combination". F><k. Now every web application tries to reimplement the look of Gnome 2.x, and does it poorly.
It still smells, because I cannot load my own web components library or/and my own CSS for use on all sites, so every site MUST reinvent wheel.
When Firefox for Linux used native GTK+ UI elements in web pages, with user theme applied, every web page looked like native applications. It was excellent. Then this feature was cut, because "every page must have the same look on every device/OS combination". F><k. Now every web application tries to reimplement the look of Gnome 2.x, and does it poorly.