I have been developing web application since 1995, and things have changed a lot since than. Back in the old days, we tried to render good in text-only browsers and machines where much slower back than. Why it that important? I had interesting problem today: write csv file filtering application in an hour.
Basically, I had one hour to make semi-formated csv file somehow searchable. It had sub-totals, and you wanted to type some words and search for then within each section (they all have to be in same section to make section visible as result). Since data is really textual report from SQL database, it seemed somehow logical to put it back into database and write complex SQL query to return just parts of it. Or store it in full-text search. In 1990 or so...
But, let's take a look in directory: I have 600K csv file. I decided to write simple cgi wrapper which understands sections (and ignores rest), basically streaming csv converted to html table back to client (which provided nice incremental rendering for bigger result sets). I had simple input-box, submit button, html table application in one hour. And it was used 522 times today, speeding up manual search and retrieve work with papers.
Let's think about this situation again. There is only one simple rule for agile: scale your solution to your problem, not to your technological preferences. Rest of the day, I spent fighting utf-8 encoding (in 2010 still, sigh!), aligning columns and formatting floating numbers (with few style="color:gray" here and there) and added highlight to lines within section which match search words.
At the end of the day, I added a simple summaries on the bottom. Not bad for 1 hour/1 day application.