> IE was holding back the progress

Oh those times. IE accepted <table><tr><td><tr></table> whereas Nestscape demanded <table><tr><td></td></tr></table> and would just not render anything else - just blank grey

Humans loved it, when they had to type all this by hand, because missing /td would not kill your page.

Permissiveness won out.

I also remember the day JavaScript hit the net.

and all those "chat rooms" that did <meta refresh> to look live suddenly had no defence against this

<script>document.write('http://twistys.com/folder/porn.jpg')</script>

or alert bombs

Oh those times. <script>document.createElement("table").appendChild(document.createElement("table"))</script> would crash IE, and some similar stupidities could even cause a BSOD as late as Windows 98.

(I think that was one such incantation, but if it wasn’t quite that it was close.)