But then again, by reading a book (and products/libraries often came with them, no waiting required), you might learn about the whole thing, instead of begging and praying that someone at stackoverflow ran into the same undocumented quasi-feature and hobbled together a jerry-rigged fix.

Compared to CGIs/PHP? Yeah, sure, finally it almost behaves like a normal GUI library. And the way things going, we're probably going to get our Taligent/MFC library soon...

I know, the OP (and Louis CK before him) were mostly arguing against the Nirvana fallacy, where people complain about the status quo as opposed to some mythical idea of perfection. Problem is, I don't see the whole browser stack as superior to previous art (i.e. definitely not mythical). Things like NeWs or Smalltalk.