Indeed every great accomplishment can be reduced to a series of simple increments ontop of previous accomplishments. Brick-by-brick we all stand on solders of giants.
Sometimes that's all it takes, man. Although I suspect there was a little more to it. Regardless, we're not celebrating the effort — many things take harder work to accomplish — we're celebrating the effect, which has been world-changing.
> The only revolution was giving the SGML client app away.
No, the revolution was this combination of three relatively simple protocols (HTTP, URL, HTML) which together were incredibly powerful. The SGML crowd never came up with anything like that. They just kept on adding more complexities...
Reducing this to "giving away the client app" misses the point of the above so badly.
Incredibly powerful, but not nearly enough for many applications. We have not comprehensively adopted Linked Data, REST and HATEOAS principles which would extend these protocols to be useful with more than simple hypertext. Many of the public JSON-serving endpoints that currently enable much of the "modern" Web could easily be extended to conformant JSON-LD, which would open up a bunch of interesting use cases.
