The underlying important functionality of the Web is the transfer of "raw" information, and in its simplest usage, this is what people should be doing.
Presentation should be strictly separated from data. Ideally the UI should be open source and modifiable. Compare this to what is currently done, where the post-processed information is provided and rendered in HTML: E.g., click "2" to see page 2 of results. It pains me everytime I need to parse HTML to extract the raw information again. How much human effort has been wasted so that ITA's Needlebase is a desirable and useful product?
Some of the problem is due to data providers wanting to control what people do with the information, so is partly a social problem. But others, not so much so, nevertheless, we still expect the data source to also present the data in a "nice" (often not-so-nice) way.
We see glimmers of hope as many web services are beginning to provide an API interface (JSON, etc.) in addition to their human-oriented Web interface.
Build the API interface first. Release it. Build a "sample" presentation program separately and independently.
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