Sorry, but this thinking is either boresome or nitpicking. Yes, you cannot own thoughts. Yes, you cannot transfer authorship of said software. Have this any relevance to the post? No. You can do transfer each and every right related to the usage of that software. You will always be named as the author, but you can not do anything with that software at all without the permission of your employer.

I do mean Javascript. Something like this:

init(Car, {
  driver: "john@example.com",
  color: "red"
});

It is similar to JSON, but notice the init function. This example creates a new Java (not Javascript) Car object, sets its driver and color attributes and starts the car when the application starts and stops it when the applicaton stops.

If in your particular configuration there are many such cars, than you are free to define your own Javascript function which can be used as a shortcut:

addCar("john@example.com", "red");

The administrator is allowed to bend the configuration syntax to his situation. And this power is almost free, the integration between Java and Javascript only requires a few lines of code in the application. For example you do not need to modify the source code of Car in the above example.

I have used Javascipt as the language of configuration files in a Java application. It replaced XML. It is a pleasure to work with Javascript for this purpose, much more comfortable than XML. I also considered YAML, but Javascript is more powerful and considering its ubiquity it does not need more learning.

However, I am not sure if real administrators would like Javascript in configuration files. At least it is standard, and has a good documentation, but the expressiveness of Javascript can be used in the wrong way too.

That said, I have not seen pop-ups and popuder ads for years. Google AdSense explicitly forbids them for example. Actually I have not experienced any of the mentioned issues recently. It seems that it is possible to easily find sites which do not have these issues.