> The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web.

The Web is not HTML (and it's not JavaScript). It's URLs. It's a machine-readable graph of clickable references on cross-linked Works Cited pages. It's certainly not Smalltalk-over-the-Internet, and it's not trying to be (at least it wasn't when TBL created it).

The biggest problem facing the Web in the 90s and still today is that everyone who saw it then hallucinated TBL describing an SRI-/PARC-style application platform because that's what they wanted it to be—including people like Alan Kay—who then perversely go on to criticize it for being so unaligned with that vision.

It is both surprising and unsurprising (given this reaction) that the industry managed to make it all the way through the 90s without Wikipedia showing up until after the crash.