Apertus is no longer under active development, so I suppose it would be fine to interpret .js files, so that they could be run straight off the blockchain.
That might work. What do you have in mind?
I thought ownership was a matter of signing a transaction with the Datacoin client, which should be possible in 0.16.
It can be
interpreted as such but there's no software support enforcing it (i.e. you can sign any tx but to what effect?) The semantics of the interpretation remains a purely social understanding. Signing a tx doesn't have any inherent meaning as far as the client is concerned.
I've had a go at fixing up the 0.16.3 client so that the GUI allows users to create pure OP_RETURN (0-valued) txs. So you can put 0.00 for the value of notarizations (of hashed resources) or
TrustyURI inscriptions (“Verifiable, Immutable, and Permanent Digital Artifacts for Linked Data” - I'll write more about them later) - they're not free, they still have a cost - the fee you pay to have the tx included in a mined block and have always been an option - as long as they were specially-crafted and submitted via the
creatrawtransaction RPC API call:
createrawtransaction [{"txid":"id","vout":n},...] {"address":amount,"data":"hex",...} ( locktime ) ( replaceable )
Create a transaction spending the given inputs and creating new outputs.
Outputs can be addresses or data.
The purpose of the GUI additions that I created is to simplify this process, now you can do the same thing from the GUI without having to craft txs by hand.
I'm also looking at the W3's
DIDs (Decentralized Identifiers) which can be inscribed via the standard Datacoin txdata mechanism but I suspect users will find some GUI guidance useful.
Cheers
Graham