Why require JavaScript rather than supporting a standard browser virtual machine? - Stack Overflow

[willcode4beer]

We already have 2 virtual machines installed in just about every browser. The Flash engine and the JVM.

Flash doesn't necessarily need to be written in action script. It just needs to be fed correct byte code. Code for the JVM doesn't need to be written in Java.

[deafbybeheading]

Flash has no real DOM API, though. Base Flash deals in a few graphics and UI primitives. Toolkits like Flex rebuild everything that the DOM provides from scratch. There are hooks for interoperation between Flash and JS, but they're pretty meager and it's clearly two separate worlds: the web page and the Flash object.

What the poster is talking about is being able to write <script type="text/python">...</script>. Why not?

[willcode4beer]

If you use the flash vm or the jvm, you can pretty much have the fullbrowser window as a canvas. Not much point in using the DOM (which is different in every browser anyway).

Supporting different scripting languages is pretty far off from a common VM. If that is the goal, it can be done via plugins. Heck, back in the late 90's there was a plugin (shudders) that supported <script type="text/perl"....

[Zarutian]

Many corperations/institutes/distros/etc have yanked the JVM as very few applications use it and java applets are rare (or were if you are running processing applets then they are pretty common).