> I struggle to imagine how it could realistically be not complex.
Pretty easy, we should have had 2 standards, one being "Web for applications", built on a VM, stdlib, bytecode, RPC, UI framework and standard library of controls, ... And "Web for web pages" which was a solved problem pre-HTML5 days.
Java and Flash (although very problematic from a security point of view) were probably better bases on which to build "Web for applications" than HTML5+/CSS3+/JS/WASM will ever be, but it was intolerable for Google/Microsoft/Mozilla to hand the keys to Oracle/Adobe for that. It's all politics, and it's all worse and more complicated and more inefficient as a result.
Pretty easy, we should have had 2 standards, one being "Web for applications", built on a VM, stdlib, bytecode, RPC, UI framework and standard library of controls, ... And "Web for web pages" which was a solved problem pre-HTML5 days.
Java and Flash (although very problematic from a security point of view) were probably better bases on which to build "Web for applications" than HTML5+/CSS3+/JS/WASM will ever be, but it was intolerable for Google/Microsoft/Mozilla to hand the keys to Oracle/Adobe for that. It's all politics, and it's all worse and more complicated and more inefficient as a result.