>>926229
You're not wrong.
Media links should be launched by an external program, and there should be minimal markup formatting. Images should still be rendered by the browser, with the option to disable download and rendering.
I suppose that the ability to render images could be isolated from the browser using a plugin system similar to the firefox vlc plugin.
Now, how would you do this without javascript or PHP.
You could create a dedicated static page linked to a session cookie and unique quantifier IP or login.
That's already been done with python and C a million times over.
The real question is why hasn't this been done?
The first company that produces an HTML and CSS formatting only, no CPU heavy tasks only site similar to youtube, amazon, or ebay should be able to take off, especially if their selling point is "faster than the competition with less data usage".
The side benefit is that you could serve the responses as xml or json to be rendered by an external program, such as a mobile app.
Programs running on the client's browser was a mistake. It has introduced the complexity of an OS for a job that should be no more difficult than rendering a PDF.