[spullara]

A few answers based on my recollections. JavaScript was a trade with Sun. Sun allowed them to name it that and Netscape integrated Applets into the browser.

As for the API, yes. You could control the DOM from Java without the big grey square of an applet through an API built into browers at the time:

https://web.mit.edu/java_v1.5.0_22/distrib/share/docs/guide/...

However, it was rarely used. The world might be a far different place if folks had used a higher performance (and at the time far more capable) language for manipulating the DOM early on rather than the focus on recreating the whole UI of the application on a canvas.