In an ideal world right now would be just about the perfect time to introduce a real virtual machine (as a first class citizen with full DOM access rather than

In an ideal world right now would be just about the perfect time to introduce a real virtual machine (as a first class citizen with full DOM access rather than forcing it to live inside a display box) into the the browser space (including mobile browsers) rather than continuing to rely on a spotty designed-in-two-weeks (at least according to Netscape lore) language that is often (badly) used as a virtual machine. I can't imagine it will actually happen for a few reasons, chief among them being browser vendor politics and the lingering taste of the failure of Java applets... but it would be nice.