[davidy123]

You don't see the inherently 'open' nature of HTML and common accessories to be a huge benefit? Sure, they can get messy, but are still bound to be more parseable and tow people along to the transformative idea of a giant shared graph with dev tools (inspection) support, compared to byte streams. Over time Flash, Java applets and other approaches have come along but been deprecated, which I'd considered to be emblematic of searching for a more transparent information commons outside one technical requirement (even if the logical conclusion of a 'semantic web' has been elusive so far). The fact that "view source" is available in all major browsers is to me incredibly meaningful and positive compared to alternative visions.

Or would your byte code blaster have similar properties?

[tnorgaard]

I think we can build it however closed or open we would like it to be. The sharing of source code I suspect is more social than technical, therefore I don't expect much change.

Java Applets, Flash, SilverLight always was at a disadvantage, not being native to the browser runtime. Startup time and the need for a "plugin" hurt them. And they all kinda sucked in their own way. I hoped for a long time that Dart / native DartVM to Chrome could make a stride, but sadly they were fighting uphill battle against the sheer volume of JS developers resisting change. I'm convinced that it's never about the language[1], but the VM and it's abstraction layer. We need a layer that we can compile JavaScript(/HTML/CSS), Scala, Haskell, C#, F# etc. down to, not more languages.

I wonder how many man-years has been wasted on vertically aligning div's inside a div. :)

[1] Guy Steele, amazing talk on "Growing a Language", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0