[protomikron]

You are right, that is the most secure platform at the moment to distribute graphical user interface programs, but I think it should go further.

E.g. I would go so far, that it shouldn't be possible by default for the server to send me a huge HTML/CSS/JS blob that does all kind of weird stuff (e.g. reporting to the host, mouse movement analysis, etc.).

I am probably in a minority with the following opinion, but I think a page shouldn't even have the ability to enforce a layout which in the end draws pixels on your screen. The web is a step forward and HTML is a good idea, but it is not used anymore in its intended form - it works very well for text distribution, but richer applications have to resort to JS.

Now if you disable JS you could in theory render it as you like, but this is far from trivial.

//edit:

Lets consider a bus company offering search to find offers that get you from A to B (i.e. a route planner, trip finder, ...).

This app shouldn't ship you random HTML/JS, but just the information you need to query its database, which is simply some GETing and POSTing of specified requests. When connecting to the app (going to https://trip-search.example.com) the host could disclose it self as an application having type `(From, Date, To, Date) -> Maybe TripList` or something like that (I think one gets the idea).

The web is great, but I think security should and must go further, I do not want run random Turing machines.

[yeknap]

> The web is great, but I think security should and must go further, I do not want run random Turing machines.

Exactly. I want a document to read, not an application to execute. Sadly that battle is feeling more and more lost as time goes by.

[geofft]

I'm not sure I get why enforcing a layout is a problem from the point of view of application distribution - if nothing else, an app should be able to embed a text renderer and draw onto a <canvas> itself. (It's probably a terrible idea, but it should be able to, because a text renderer is just a program that takes in data and outputs some pixels, and that class of programs is useful.)

I do certainly agree that we need a way of distributing hyper-text content efficiently and in a standard way. Unfortunately the web seems to be moving away from that goal, and AMP isn't quite right and has its own problems.

I'm not sure how I feel about permissions by default. I think permission fatigue is definitely a thing, and for most apps I don't actually care about them exfiltrating mouse movements to the host, as long as they can only exfiltrate it to the one host. On the other hand, I'm a little weirded out that if I plug my piano into my Chromebook, JavaScript can receive and send MIDI events without any permission prompt.

EDIT to your edit: I'm totally okay with running random Turing machines, if their execution environment is constrained (which it is). The only resources that an arbitrary Turing-complete programming language can access are any external resources that it's specifically given an interface to, and time/memory/power consumption. The web platform is pretty good (though, yes, not perfect) at locking down the interfaces given to JS. So it's just a matter resource limits, which is fairly easy; I'm not always thrilled with how much CPU and battery life Twitter takes, for instance, but it's always killable. (Again, in theory.)

You can construct something that's capable of using plenty of memory or power out of any sufficiently powerful Turing-incomplete language. See, for instance, CSS. (I bet with the mechanism you're proposing, you can end up chaining server-side APIs in ways that let you DoS the client, because the server is always more powerful.) And given how easy it is to achieve Turing-completeness by mistake, it doesn't seem like a productive constraint.

[protomikron]

> I'm not sure I get why enforcing a layout is a problem from the point of view of application distribution - if nothing else, an app should be able to embed a text renderer and draw onto a <canvas> itself.

Yeah, but in my opinion that is already a specific type of application, like e.g. a computer game, PDF viewer, plotting application.

It is totally different from e.g. an application like Wikipedia or a news page, that provides mostly text and images.

In the end there should just be more of the functionality on client side (rules how to render news pages, how to render wikipedia, etc.).