But this is the key distinction! People are making proprietary protocols (serialized as JSON or SOAP, but the meaning of a request or response is completely ad hoc) and using them to build siloed apps. These appear to be part of the World-Wide Web, because they tunnel over HTTP and TCP. But they actually aren't, because their exposed resources don't have stable URLs or formats and are basically unusable by anything other than one blob of js you have to trust. This should be recognized as tending to displace the web, rather than contributing to it.
I was not being pedantic. I was being subtle about my point that if people wanted to use the internet as an applications-delivery platform they could have defined their own damned internet service instead of making life difficult for those of us who want to use the web for its original purpose of reading and writing.
It makes life difficult for us by making the browser into a huge ball of complexity and churn. (I still remember the days when the people who wanted to use the web as an applications-delivery platform implored people to upgrade to Internet Explorer 5 to make their lives easier, and of course they were not satisfied with IE 5 for long.) The vast majority of the crashes, unresponsiveness and mystifying software behavior on my Linux and OS X systems come from the graphical browser.
You mean the web. Do not confuse the web with the internet.