Gaps will never haunt you, you know the story, if a recruiter or interviewer is interested, just give them a back story, doesn't even need to be a blatant lie. I have gaps in my CV of up to three years, I just moved to a different industry, but I was always working as a freelance and was always upgrading my knowledge. Maybe the market was not right, maybe you had personal issues, who knows... I honestly don't think this matters, the only way to screw up the answer to the gap question is with something like "Yeah, I did a 3 stretch for drugs, but it's all good now".

About webdev... I don't know, I've been crunching code for a decade now and I'm still not tired, I have done other stuff like CMS implementation, native windows desktop apps, office plugins, APIs, console abstractions... whatever, I understand this is not necessarily something you might want to do, but tell you want, maybe you need a break from the industry anyway... When I had my 3 year gap I went to work for Immigration and then I came up with the idea for a system that I then developed and sold to them. Sometimes the gap is exactly what you need to come back with fresh ideas.