But if all web applications were to serve content as meaningful objects, then the underlying format could be anything, so long as it were standardised. VMs coul

But if all web applications were to serve content as meaningful objects, then the underlying format could be anything, so long as it were standardised. VMs could transmit everything as JSON if they so chose, but they might as well use a binary format because no human need ever see it. If all applications are communicating using the same abstractions, then it doesn’t even matter what language they’re written in. My site can be written in Haskell and it’ll serve blog entries just as well to Haskell on the Firefox VM on Windows as to Ruby on the Chrome VM on a Linux toaster. And we never need to agree on an interchange format, because that’s the VM’s job.