Hello! Long-time lurker in the community here. Want to check with you all on the sanity of this idea because I feel like someone would have thought of this by now. I may be missing some huge problem.
The web has evolved over time for two separate uses: serving mostly static web pages/resources, and running highly interactive portable applications. The latter of which as you know can be slowed down quite a bit in both performance and development due to the tie to JavaScript and the DOM.
My idea is to build a platform-agnostic low-level API that WASM code can call for sandboxed memory management, graphics, network calls, and audio. Pages that use this API would be pure WASM still served by HTTP; existing independently of the usage of HTML/CSS/JavaScript for more static web pages. This functionality can get built into existing browsers.
As a prototype, a small browser could be built that only supports this type of web page.
Security risks would be high but it doesn't seem like it would be much crazier than the security risks of current web browser functionality.