Having worked in web development for the past 9 years the one technical aspect that I feel has "let the web down" would have to be HTML and the way various browsers implement/interpret various HTML standards. What I'm basically talking about are the little bugs, nuisances, differences that can cause HTML compliant web pages to appear different across various browsers and platforms. As a student new to web pages you might be wondering what I'm taking about and on basic web pages you probably won't run into to many problems. Without going into too much detail here's an interesting article on cross browser issues. http://anthonyshort.com.au/blog/comments/how-to-get-cross-browser-compatibility-everytime/
The fact that HTML standards have been defined and established does not necessarily mean it will be adhered to in the same way by all browser manufacturers. The situation we have now is that the most widely used browser, Internet Explorer by Microsoft, in my opinion it's more important that your web pages appear correctly in this browser than it is to necessary have a WC3 compliant web page.
Don't get me wrong things have gotten better since my "early days" (around 2000). Back then it wasn't unusual for web developers to create duplicate web pages catering for specific browsers. Using javascript web developers could establish what browser a user was operating and serve up a web page designed specifically for that browser. Totally frustrating! Lets not even talk about multimedia such as audio and video, this was pure guess work back in the day due to the number of add on multimedia applications out there. Nowadays thanks to the Flash application, multimedia seems to be sorted out and Flash seems to be the adopted standard for delivering many forms of multimedia, take You Tube for example which relies on Flash to serve up videos and audio.
I guess all I'm saying is beware, HTML and browsers are far from perfect. If you plan on getting into web design/development you need to think about how pages appear to your audience.
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The way HTML/CSS is handled by different browsers can be a hassle, particularly if you're a developer. It seems there's no rhyme nor reason. Keep up the good work.
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