Alan Kay is opposed to the "principle of least power" and instead believes the web should consist of turing-complete "objects" which manage their own rendering.
Basically he wants a web consisting purely of "black box" Java Applets rather than of web pages. I think this vision have failed multiple times for obvious reasons.
Repeating what I said in the original comment: the web should HAVE a VM; it shouldn't BE a VM.
The web is hyperlinked DATA that optionally leads you to CODE. The VM-centric design is mistaken and broken, and it's a moot point because it won't ever be deployed in at a large scale in practice.
Like Kay's other designs, it's OK for a small scale and clean slate, but not for a large scale.
Importantly, the web can have and has had MULTIPLE VMs -- Java (via NSAPI), Flash, JavaScript, WebAssembly, and I would say PDF since all browsers now have readers built-in. The design of languages for code is more difficult and ephemeral than the design of languages for data.
The web scales with TIME (decades), not just users (billions of people). Kay's designs don't scale in either direction.
Kays vision is like if we only had JavaScript drawing directly to the screen, and no HTML or any of the other web standards. In such a web we wouldn't have search engines, probably not even links.
The object oriented paradigm (with data and behavior encapsulated in black-box objects) works fine for software systems, but it absolutely fails for large decentralized communication systems. TBL understood that and instead based the web on declarative data formats, and eliminated the behavior to a few verbs (GET, POST etc.) with constrained semantics.
OOP is great when appropriate but it seems Kay doesn't recognize the limitations of the paradigm. Even Java have abandoned the strict object-dogmatism and embrace more data-oriented patterns.
Yes exactly; I think of the web as a modest and humble (and thus brilliant) extension of Unix. It adds simple networking and hyperlinks to hierarchical namespaces (and extends hierarchical names as URLs).
Those principles scale. GET/POST is basically the Unix/Plan 9 principle of read() / write() of declarative formats.
On a small scale you can avoid that and use more tightly coupled RPC (and maybe you should), and you can design more elaborate VMs.
On a large scale it all becomes REST (e.g. what do you talk to Github with, what does a Debian repo look like, etc.). It's less about the technical design and more about the social issues -- who owns each end of the wire? If you own both ends of the wire, you have a much different problem, but that's not the problem the web is solving.
When watching the Kay talk, I was struck that he seems to be lumping every "good" in software engineering under the term "object oriented". Virtual machines are objects. Servers are objects. Numbers should be objects. All abstraction is objects. It was not really a useful or enlightening way of thinking about the world.
Basically he wants a web consisting purely of "black box" Java Applets rather than of web pages. I think this vision have failed multiple times for obvious reasons.