Actually, the underlying foundations of WWW -- primarily HTTP and hypertext -- are excellently designed from the beginning. The problem is in fact that they were designed too well -- it was too easy to build a good-enough content that was easily accessible by a lot of users, and the real harm was done not by the amateurs, but by the "wrong" kind of professionals -- graphic designers and developers from other kinds of the field (databases, system, financials) who failed to understand the capabilities and specifics of this new platform.
EDIT: Removed assertion that Web was implemented excellently from the beginning; I understand that HTTP 1.0 was inefficient, and there were other early issues. But the design was sound, and the implementation improved quickly.
I disagree with the first bit. HTTP is an ambiguous, overcomplicated mess. I regularly have to wedge myself into the stack and deal with things like cookie directives, pipelining, persistent connections and utterly broken caching semantics etc. It's just horrible from end to end.
HyperText itself is fundamentally a well engineered concept (I mean it worked fine for HyperCard etc) but to base the public facing WWW on SGML was just a plain horrible idea.
For a number of years I actually preferred Gopher, WAIS and Usenet. I still do now when I think about it for the sheer simplicity and the fact it's designed to push indexes and information to rather than to ooze marketoid vomit.
Agree with the "wrong kind of professionals" statement though.
I see where both of you are coming from, but I can't help but notice the number of competing network protocols and formats that HTTP/HTML defeated in the market. Did the web succeed despite its technical failings or because of them?
Possibly a mix. The fact that the protocols were free an unencumbered, and reference implementations of both server and client software were provided helped immensely as well. Any idiot could come along and either pick up working pieces or modify them. And they did.
Tim O'Reilly's had a few things to say about watching the Web take off. Its primary competition was closed systems: either entirely closed networks, or proprietary protocols, or both. He wasn't willing to bet his company on any such thing. When the Web emerged, it was clear to him that it was the solution he'd been looking for.
I used to appreciate the initial web and happily changed from desktop based application development to web based ones.
Nowadays, after so many scars from Web applications projects trying to bend the technology to mimic as close as possible the desktop with broken abstractions and browser issues, I gladly take desktop consulting projects over web ones.
EDIT: Removed assertion that Web was implemented excellently from the beginning; I understand that HTTP 1.0 was inefficient, and there were other early issues. But the design was sound, and the implementation improved quickly.