I have the feeling that as soon as the web got obsessed with HTTP(s) only transactions between nodes, people reinvented/rediscovered/hack-reimplemented socket's semantics on top of it.
It's hard for the web to become "obsessed with HTTP", because web is HTTP.
Pedantry aside, as soon as web/HTTP became The Internet (protocol of choice), you are right that the rest was bound to happen.
However, exactly the fact that it wasn't too constrained and allowed a lot of messing around (including with HTML, compared to eg gopher which was more semantic) is what made it "win" over all the other protocols except maybe email (and even there, >50% of people read it with web clients).
I think GP's talking not just about server-client connections but also server-server connections? In the latter case HTTP(S) wasn't as popular as it is today until the late aughts.
I was speaking about the web as a net-work (not just web as in HTTP webpages). There are other protocols such as FTP, SMTP, and direct socket connections over TCP and UDP, but many of these use cases were absorved by REST only (HTTP) transactions and now websockets.
That's exactly the misconception I was trying to correct, assuming you made it while understanding the difference.
That suite of protocols is a suite of internet protocols, and "web" (from "world wide web", certainly familiar from www in websites) is a combination of HTML served over HTTP. If it has evolved to mean the internet, my apologies, but 10-20 years ago if you said "web", you meant HTTP:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
no... you are just trying to be pedanting. Web, the metaphor coming from a spider web and commonly understood as the interconnection formed by networks, could be perfectly understood as inter+net as well. And web+page as what the HTTP was purposed. And all that text brings nothing to the conversation.
