>clickable words that would display other documents

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS ;)

That's exactly what I was going to say. It was never meant for all of this in the first place. We've spent millions of man-hours trying to turn a squirrel into a dinosaur.

Worse yet, it's becoming more and more difficult to simply read the freaking web as a series of documents, which was the entire purpose in the first place. There's TOS, pages that don't work without JS, and so on. I fully expect publishers to try to force legislation to require people to download all this crap simply to read an essay, whether they want to or not.

We had a nice hammer, and we're doing a pretty good job of pounding everything else in the universe into various versions of a nail. But it's ugly.

NeWS was a lovely thing (and the HyperNeWS environment that was built on it is still one of all time favourite frameworks) but I'm not sure it was directly comparable with HTML+JS+AJAX - it was more like an attempt to do a better X11.

Specifically I don't remember (even, ironically given its name, in HyperNews) there being much support for working with documents or hyperlinks. Mind you - it did do the client side scripting in a wonderful way (at least if PostScript is your thing).

I also seem to remember that it didn't have a particularly strong security model?

Is it really square pegs for round holes?

I don't think that the web as a mechanism for distributing applications would look much different even if it hadn't gone through the HTML stage. If not JS, it would have been Java applets. If not HTML, then some weird XML layout schema.

There might have been a time where the web as a platform for applications was beyond silly, but this is not htat time. The platform is decidedly for shipping applications as well as pages.

Oberon also used the model. There was even an Oberon-based, Javascript replacement for mobile code, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system)