I love WebAssembly components and that's great progress. But I feel like everyone is missing a golden opportunity here to take apart the giant OS-sized web API and break some of it out into smaller standard or subscribable subsets that also don't try to mix information presentation and applications in a forced way.

Example subsets:

- (mainly textual) information sharing

- media sharing

- application sharing with, small standard interface like WASI 2 or better yet including some graphics

- complex application sharing with networking

Smaller subsets of the giant web API would make for a better security situation and most importantly make it feasible for small groups to build out "browser" alternatives for information sharing, media or application sharing.

This is likely to not be pursued though because the extreme size of the web API (and CSS etc.) is one of the main things that protects browser monopolies.

Even further, create a standard webassembly registry and maybe allow people to easily combine components without necessarily implementing full subsets.

Do webassembly components track all of their dependencies? Will they assume some giant monolithic API like the DOM will be available?

What you're doing is essentially creating a distributed operating system definition (which is what the web essentially is). It can be designed in such a way that people can create clients for it without implementing massive APIs themselves.