> the output is expected to be on the web
That's no more true now than it has been for the past 10 to 15 years. However, output is just one view; something that automatically generates HTML to display things, like scientific data, is great, but that's far from the only, or even primary, way that many things are consumed from the internet.
Other views exist that can visualise the same data in other ways. That is, data can be available online without necessarily being web first. Heck, most things are — data provided to mobile apps and desktop clients via services that might have a web frontend.
My personal thinking is that people really are too hooked on this narrative about the browser as an OS, and maybe have gotten tunnel vision from it.
The internet, as it is today, is still mainly services. Many things may be more and more accessible in the web by preference, yet remain freely available and consumable through other forms (REST APIs, direct database access, etc) and delivered through apps and integrations within operating systems. Some examples might include:
- Dropbox: files sync with the various apps and utilities
- iCloud: mail, contact, calendar are mostly consumed by the native apps. Pages, Keynote, Numbers documents are mostly edited in the Mac apps.
- Office 365: the Windows apps remain the dominant way to access and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.
- Github: the most popular source code repository today, but still very much consumed at the command line. The website is strongest at wiki editing, forums, and so on, but the bulk of code moving back and forth done with the `git` command or IDE integration.
Let us not underestimate how much of the internet is not primarily consumed in web browsers and likely never will be through the vast majority of certain markets (for instance, developers), where internet-located data will be consumed as services that interact with apps much more than as web sites.