So... if you feel like it, we can split hairs and say that HTML is a dead end as a data interchange format, in the same way that orange juice is a dead end as motor fuel. That's not what's really being discussed here though.

The pertinent quote in the article is:

> HTML is ultimately as strategically dead as 3270 is. HTML suffers from the same ultimate fatal weaknesses that doomed 3270

The implication is that HTML is a dead end in general because it doesn't act as an interchange format, not that it's specifically & narrowly a dead end within that use-case.

As for "business transactions & ecommerce", that's a vaguer phrase. If you mean using HTML to exchang transaction data between business application APIs, then of course it's not appropriate. If you mean using HTML to provide human interfaces to ecommerce & business transactions, then that's a different debate (not at all touched on by this article).