Ditto. As an aside, while it's certainly true that if one can compromise a web server (whether serving static HTML or generating dynamic HTML) then it's game o

Ditto. As an aside, while it's certainly true that if one can compromise a web server (whether serving static HTML or generating dynamic HTML) then it's game over, the modern style of JavaScript-centric development greatly expands the attack surface. An attacker can compromise any of a number of different servers (e.g. analytics providers), via numerous means; moreover, he can serve dynamic malicious code, and quickly respond to changes the targeted site makes (his implant needs to survive for awhile, but his access can be revoked and folks can still be compromised). Websites which served static pages and received credit-card information via simple forms would be far more secure than dynamic web apps stitched together from JavaScript served from multiple servers in countries across the globe, with data inserted into the DOM retrieved from multiple servers across the globe. I contend that a more traditional, static architecture would tend to lead to better architectural isolation. As an example, if one needed to install server-side analytics software rather than simply injecting it into a page at runtime, then one would download and install it once: any compromise of the analytics provider after one had download it would be irrelevant. But with dynamic JavaScript, one's users download the analytics software with every single page load: a compromise instantly affects users. Moreover, with traditional server-side software one tends to have reasonably-well defined protocols for interaction, rather than just saying, 'hey, I'll run all your code in the same process as everything else.' But with client-side JavaScript, any piece of code can see everything. As an engineering community, we've adopted a style which has great costs as well as great benefits. My opinion is that we moved too quickly, and now we're feeling the pain. While a universal portable app framework is pretty awesome, JavaScript layered over a document system is probably not the best way to achieve that. As I wrote years ago, JavaScript delenda est.