Pretty but dangerous

There seems to be a fundamental dichotomy between "rich" web applications and those simple enough for users to modify, mashup, or monitor. All "formats" want to expand until they are Turing complete, so the user can never be sure exactly what it is doing, and access the OS and network in arbitrary ways, so the user never knows what privacy is violated. For example, Adobe PDF, Windows Media Player, Flash, and of course the web browser and e-mail client. Of course, extensibility has its benefits, to never be completely stymied by the limits of the format. But back in the day, perhaps this is nostalgia for a past that never actually existed, it was just straight static text, and the user had control over the font size, width and height, color. The user could use easily use a screen reader if he were blind. These days every one of these features don't exist or totally break a typical Web 2.0 application.

I honestly believe that the point of the internet is the content, and not stalking users with cookies or Flash plug-ins that surreptitiously turn on the user's microphone and listen in on the room. I believe we can simplify, while at the same time concentrate the Turing-complete part into sandboxes, like with Java. We can isolate content produces from consumers with peer-to-peer technologies.