Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like it dates from earlier internet, before the age of walled garden takeover, when it still seemed like a decentralized internet would be the thing, and everyone would be, like, using a desktop GUI to create html or something. Of course everyone should have a webserver on their machine, right? Apple was ahead of the curve on something that never arrived and many of us still miss.
The web sharing was more about sharing on local networks. It was the same concept as the Public folder for file sharing which dates back to NeXT. When Bonjour née Rendezvous was released Apple build an Apache module for it. When web sharing was enabled it would advertise the server over Bonjour. Safari still supports Bonjour server discovery IIRC. The Apache install would obviously work over the Internet but sharing…
What kind of content do you think they imagined as use cases for local network http server over bonjour? Like for a small business? Or household? Or giving strangers access to something when you happened to be physically adjacent and on the same network?
It still seems like kind of evidence of a decentralized networking environment that never really came to be... bonjour in general kind of is, although it's still there and gets used for some specific things. But we have ended up doing a lot more connections "cloud-mediated" instead of peer-to-peer.