In one of the best bits of one of my favorite films, a gaggle of back office boys are presented with a bag of unlikely looking parts and told "we have too much CO₂, this is all we have to work with". The result isn't pretty, but it's good enough. So it is with the Web, when there's a problem, the geeks come up with an answer which doesn't involve launching yet another rocket:

Quick, we need more bandwidth!

Bury more fiber? Um, DSL, different coloured lasers?

We're running out of IP addresses, and need security

Roll out IPv6! Er, what about NAT, and there's this TLS thing?

I want animation, GUIs!

Flash, Applets! Er, did you know you can call HTTP asynchronously from Javascript?

We need Single-Sign-On!

You can do that with a little redirection and hashing — OpenID?

You can't use certificates inside a browser!

You can't?

The Web is for people and I want Web Services!

Er, Why?

And so it continues. The story of the Web is "good enough".