I was on the internet before HTML and long before Mosaic...

I agree with one aspect of the narrative you're saying, his idea was held as being for «documents». To be sure, document was more abstract than document on a Mac.

Either way, I'm very sad it mostly turned into animated brochures instead.

But the reason styles were separate, the reason everyone talked about semantics, was always about the universal knowledge DAG and enabling machines to help us navigate and retrieve it. It's why so many of the early agents referenced navigation (Spyglass, Navigator) or the interconnectedness of things (Mosaic).

So, ok, big document “store”, but that's a lifeless noun. The information you are looking for, the dots connected for you surfacing what you didn't know, that's a living growing thing, an agentic retrieval savvy knowledge engine, distributed for curation and resilience.

The librarian was always to be a machine or many, on our behalf.