Prior to cell phones being powerful enough to just shove megabytes of JS at them and expect them to work it out, the web had a lot of little subsets like this. I'm sure it wasn't really "the web", but a few pages that used HTTP to access them but if you strayed outside that set it completely disintegrated. I believe I saw some Palm Pilot optimized web sites, there used to be web sites optimized for mobile devices back when that meant something, there were some Dreamcast-optimized sites, etc. It is probably better to imagine it as access to their bespoke services over HTTP, and they were all pretty useless as they lacked any network effect.