Paul Ford over at FTrain has written a rant about the difficulty of producing web sites. It starts from Processing, moves on to a micro passion-play about RDF, and then bemoans the state of web technology:

After countless hours setting up databases, tweaking CSS, and defining schemas, learning RDF so that I can borrow ideas from it, and thinking about what a link actually is, I can say with confidence that the web is not beautiful. In terms of the maturity of a technology, which can be measured as being a technology's ability to reflect the actual skills and awareness of the individuals it seeks to serve, the web is about equivalent to a IBM PC Jr.

It's a great cheese log of an essay (you'll see what I mean). If you've ever struggled with duct-taping together all the disparate technologies that are behind the scenes of a modern web site, you'll want to read it.