There was a fundamental shift about 15 years ago where webpages ceased to be markup documents (perhaps with some active elements for convenience) and became jav

There was a fundamental shift about 15 years ago where webpages ceased to be markup documents (perhaps with some active elements for convenience) and became javascript applications that ran in your web browser. To use your book analogy - the web is no longer a bunch of books on a shelf, it's an AR device that shoots lasers into your eye. The net effect may be the same in many use-cases, but not necessarily, and malicious actors now have far more flexibility and power because we've all become accustomed to running random code we download off the internet with a single click. I am, obviously, not a huge fan of this shift and think a large majority of sites could operate perfectly well under the "markup document" model without needing actual code-execution privileges, or more than a minimal set of code-execution privileges for those actual simple document-related use-cases. Go back to being mostly just a book, basically. Almost all of the use-cases that javascript gets used for in a document context could really be replaced by navigation between sets of linked, static pages (perhaps embedded where needed) - boy, what an idea. If you delivered a site "as a gzip" then there should barely be any noticeable size difference from that anyway, especially compared to downloading mountains of JS embeds. The amount of things that truly, truly need interactivity is pretty low - things like chat clients come to mind, but does your bank need to be running javascript on your end? Probably not.