Unfortunately Javascript-infested websites are a bit of an archival nightmare. Javascript can do pretty much anything it wants, it isn't consistent in that sense. You can't run them offline.
Javascript in the browser is just a bad idea all around.
You can generally "Save As..." and they tend to work just fine. Like any code which has network access, they can be dependent on various resources. I sometimes run a downloaded file through an insecure chrome instance (--disable-web-security and a unique --user-data-dir) with a catch-all service-worker. That'd probably not work with applets as they make their requests outside the browser AFAIK.
Also the security sandbox of Javascript is one of the best, if not the best. So it cannot do anything it wants.
Not everything is a chat application. But even a chat application can and should partially work without an internet connection: Reading old messages and composing new ones can work offline.
That has nothing to do with Javascript. If you use canonical, cacheable URIs for your requests, my method above works fine.
In my day job, I'm working on a CRM and sales system that is 100% web based and does work offline and is even offline-first (I love you Germany, but your mobile network sucks).
There may be many other problems with it but offline is mostly a solved problem in the web world.
Quick experiment: In a new Firefox profile, I opened a couple of websites [1]. Then I went offline and tried to load them again. Every time I just got the default "server not found" page of Firefox.
"Offline" is no more solved "not hijacking scrolling", "linkable URLs" and "not re-inventing <a href> badly".
Did you try right clicking and choosing "Save as..."?
As I said before, it's a 5-minute thing to get started with service-workers. Web-sites can use that and then you don't even need to save. There is this great offline library, fellow developers! Use it! What other platform gives you such easy-to-use offline capabilities?
> As I said before, it's a 5-minute thing to get started with service-workers. Web-sites can use that and then you don't even need to save.
I don't care if websites can use that if they don't.
> You are dealing with a Turing-complete language here.
That's the fucking problem.
> What is the alternative you are supporting instead the current situation?
Using a proper application platform instead of a pile of hacks on top of the web. Without that pile of hacks, the web would actually be usable because publishers would not be able to break the UX.
