It makes sense to me on some level. I realize that not everyone is a fan of Emacs but there's some truth to the old jab: "it's a decent operating that just needs a good text editor." It's more like a decent lisp that provides a kernel for implementing a text editor. I think it would be interesting if the web took that bottom-up approach (what I call the, "Emacs Philosophy," for lack of a better word): establishing a kernel for implementing a web browser. The interesting thing about Emacs is that there are several implementation of web server that are fully capable of interacting with the rest of the "environment" inside of your running Emacs process: it can serve up a web page that renders your currently active buffer for instance.
The problem with this approach is the trade-off with standardization: some vendors will implement things in different ways and libraries may not always work together without a little effort on the part of the user. Standardization does have its benefits... we almost went down the rabbit hole of active-x and "this site is made for Y," in the web world and it would be a shame to repeat that nasty bit of history (but we're already looming fairly close). The problem is that not everyone will cooperate and fickle web developers concerned with elegance and prettiness will go off and write three different incompatible implementations of the same thing. Users don't care about that stuff.
The problem with this approach is the trade-off with standardization: some vendors will implement things in different ways and libraries may not always work together without a little effort on the part of the user. Standardization does have its benefits... we almost went down the rabbit hole of active-x and "this site is made for Y," in the web world and it would be a shame to repeat that nasty bit of history (but we're already looming fairly close). The problem is that not everyone will cooperate and fickle web developers concerned with elegance and prettiness will go off and write three different incompatible implementations of the same thing. Users don't care about that stuff.