Too Long; Didn't Read
I’d definitely say the web is a bad tool for most of the things we use it for. In particular, the technique of using javascript sitting within a document to dynamically edit that document’s structure & CSS attributes is a particularly inefficient way of building a user interface, and without the heavy optimization being done by browser maintainers any such application would be unusable. (As much as I dislike Java, I have to admit that applets are actually the appropriate solution here.)