20/20: Java applets needed better integration, access to the host browser's runtime. Like accessing the current page's DOM, being able to hook the event loop.

I didn't care at the time. I hated all things HTML, CSS, JS. Such a downgrade from state of the art. I regarded the browser as terrible means to deliver, bootstrap applets. Just like Flash.

One thing I didn't appreciate at the time was the genius of HTTP and URLs.

I'm still completely baffled by the "worse is better" thesis. I just can't understand why JavaScript was created, much less why it succeeded.

One can understand how mistakes like \0 terminated strings and SQL's NULL happen, become hard to undo. But JavaScript is the original sin that just keeps poisoning. Other platforms, ecosystems learn and grow and mature. JavaScript stubbornly refuses to acknowledge truth and goodness, and is all the more successful for it's belligerence.

Amazing.

JS is an accident of history, and won because of market quirks rather than technical merits. JS was created because Netscape thought it would be cool to have webpages that were somewhat interactive. They were a relatively small and chaotic startup throwing shit at the wall; MS did what MS does, which was to embrace / extend / extinguish, and by doing so they established JS as a must-have feature for all browsers. Before GMail and GMaps, JS was not particularly successful - it was largely just a novelty. Seriously-interactive stuff would still use ActiveX, Flash, Java, or just live outside the browser altogether (Napster...). Then a combination of JS improvements (XHR), publicity efforts (Crockford and GMail), and the market standardizing on minimum common denominator (avoiding deployment and security issues of plugins) left us alone in the room with this beast.

And Flash... I think a lot of the commercial use cases that Java was supposed to enable were actually filled by Flash.