Intent for the ability to run code on the web goes back at least as far as discussions around HTML3, and you can find discussion about it on mailing lists from 1995[0]. Before javascript took over, the intent behind the <SCRIPT> tag was to support multiple scripting languages[1], and of course <APPLET> isn't exactly new. It isn't true that the web was "never intended for apps to be in scope at all," rather it is true that HTML didn't support anything of the sort from its initial version. Of course, HTML initially didn't support much of anything.
The reason the distinction isn't present in web standards is that likely no one foresaw the massive complexity of modern js applications using HTML as a GUI analogue - it was assumed that code on the web would be like shell scripts or utility scripts, and javascript was just intended for light housekeeping, nothing that would necessitate forking the entire web to create an "app" space.
However I have yet to find much evidence of hostility towards the concept of running code on the web from the people who actually came up with it - the "javascript delenda est[2]" attitude seems to be a modern ideology. Rather, the discussions I've read were about how to make it possible, what languages to use, etc. Not how to prevent it.
The reason the distinction isn't present in web standards is that likely no one foresaw the massive complexity of modern js applications using HTML as a GUI analogue - it was assumed that code on the web would be like shell scripts or utility scripts, and javascript was just intended for light housekeeping, nothing that would necessitate forking the entire web to create an "app" space.
However I have yet to find much evidence of hostility towards the concept of running code on the web from the people who actually came up with it - the "javascript delenda est[2]" attitude seems to be a modern ideology. Rather, the discussions I've read were about how to make it possible, what languages to use, etc. Not how to prevent it.
[0]https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/OverviewOld.ht...
[1]https://eager.io/blog/a-brief-history-of-weird-scripting-lan...
[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11447851