As noted, that's a shell-specific artefact, which makes me shudder thinking of DOS's command-specific globbing.

And not all bashes support this -- Debian (and I suspect Ubuntu, Mint, etc., based on it) disables this option at build time.

You can get something fairly close via netcat, though IMO that also shows some of the weaknesses of the approach, which is that you're not interacting with a web page, say, so much as you're talking http to a socket. Not that there aren't times when that isn't an entirely sensible thing to do, but if you just want to read stupid stuff on the Wobbly Wobbly Wibble, it's a bit too thinky.

(All of which I'm sure schoen knows far better than I, though others might not.)

The idea of talking protocol-based stuff through something that looks vaguely directory / file-ish, and which could do sensible things with HTML (or audio, video, data, messaging stuff, email stuff, crypto stuff) and through which utilities and utilities would have access without needing to be specifically adapted to handle the cases might be interesting.

But it doesn't generalize outside of bash -- and where do you think bash got the idea from?

I'm sure bash got the idea from Plan 9, although I didn't know that until recently.