At least there was a distinction between web of documents (WWW) and shipped apps with custom canvas. Rendering apps with web’s DOM is stupid. It makes websites a mess and relies on everyone using the same monoculture of browsers (like we now have Chromium, WebKit and Gecko, all nearly identical).
If browser does not support one feature (like CSS’s transform), the whole house of cards breaks. It’s like making ASCII art in notepad and then expecting everyone to use the same notepad app with the same font and style, to not break our art proportions.
We need to split web into websites and webapps, with webapps being browser dependent or full custom canvases and websites being immutable human-readable and editable format.
They were an absolute nightmare for security. Now that could be mitigated with better design but attacks are much more sophisticated nowadays.
You just straight don’t want a website executing things on your computer. It’s got too many potential problems.
Visiting a website would allow hackers to execute a likely vulnerable application on your system.
This is exactly why everyone moved to html5 and websites being trapped inside the browser’s sandbox. They literally have no access to your system.
The other issue is you don’t want to have to install software to visit a website at all. So the ones that use it will straight away be at a disadvantage with less tech savvy or even more privacy focused users.
Why I added “standardized and open source” in the title. I don’t want random things executed eather and JavaScript is exacly that, but isolated. My post is about building apps heavly relient of all HTML/CSS/JS spec working exaclly the same just to bend and hack upon it to make something like custom canvas. In other words, modern sandoxed applets, if standardized, build-in and open source, would be much more healthy for web ecosystem. Why? Because to open this app browser need a compiler, OpenGL and http support, instead of impossible task of implementing all current CSS and JS APIs.
I don’t see how creating new specs and standards would help with the issues mentioned. Namely specs and standards that have to be implemented.
OpenGL is already accessible on webpages. As are canvasses.
The only way to achieve it is to have an installable plugin that browsers just embed. Which is exactly what we had before and comes with the issues I’ve mentioned.
This also requires everyone agreeing to a single spec. Which hasn’t even been achieved with CSS/js.
With OpenGL there is no need for much of new spec needed actually :). What we need to stop is
<div><div><div><div>...with complicated JavaScript boilerplate. And yes, I know dev is paid to make new function by boss that does not care if it breaks what web was created for, but I take my rant.</div></div></div></div>