Get rid of most of JS to prevent 'appification' and keep the focus document centered.
Edit: I think this would result in protocols over walled gardens. The problem is JS makes HTTP/HTML everything to everyone.
Edit: I think this would result in protocols over walled gardens. The problem is JS makes HTTP/HTML everything to everyone.
The alternative to JS is not "no scripting", it's websites that only function with proprietary plugins installed.
Yes and those were websites that for the most part nobody gave a crap about. The important sites weren't willing to dump so many of their viewers. Heck, even post-JS, the web didn't suck so badly until the option of shutting off JS was removed from browser UI's. Before that, enough users shut off JS that sites wanting wide audiences had to be able to function without it.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6355300/copy-to-clipboar...
I'm confused by this comment - HTML5 does do all that out of the box. Are you saying it should have done it from the start?
I don't get the bit about JS being required to render static content either...
Should MS Word and Adobe PDF also execute code? Should I only be able to run an application only by executing it in MS Word and Adobe PDF reader?
Oh boy do I have news for you! https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/applying-actions-scrip...
Not sure about Word as I barely know it, but I'm sure you can execute some sort of code. If not JS, probably VBA or other Microsoft language.
Flash got axed because the way it was implemented into clients was wasteful, insecure and a bad user experience in general. Same with Java; you can't make the same tools that Java applets once provided through the browser because of the browser's security model, so I'd say the two never competed.
Making a quick interactive animation that works across all kinds of resolutions and sizes was trivial in Flash, but in HTML5 this is a challenge. HTML5 and friends fixed the problems that made web developers grasp at Flash for, like file uploads, animations and predictable interaction with the mouse and keyboard. These features were often already possible in browsers, but Flash was the only tool that made them appear the same in every browser available. They didn't replace the flash scene for games, interactive simulations and other online experiences. The Flash game scene pretty much died when Flash started getting blocked by Chrome, with only a small subset of the community fragmenting and finding their way to frameworks like Unity Web and its then plentiful competitors with high learning curves because they were designed for the "real deal" game developers rather than self-taught animators that turned game dev.
I think JS is a necessity for the web to exist today, but we need an alternative for what once was Flash, Java, Shockwave and more. Too many features have been shoved into HTML and Javascript that have no business there, left to be abused by trackers and hackers alike.
I don't see how it would. I think it would have led to something equivalent to JavaScript, because that's exactly the route we took to get to here. The WWW started as just documents, and there were plenty of protocols for other internet things. Businesses and consumers (and almost everyone else) want more than documents, and avoiding requiring people to install and run a separate client for every purpose (and requiring developers to build said cross-platform clients) led to plug-ins and then capable JavaScript.
Eventually, someone would try to ship everything to everyone through the internet, and they'll figure out a way. It's all just byte streams anyway. Perhaps something like java applet or Flash, or some worse version of "Click this to install our plugin".