This is perhaps a good example of how sometimes you can't force the hand of progress, it simply takes some time. So many ideas that were novel additions to Javascript at the time but are standard practice in one form or another today. The touted reason for its failure was lack of backwards compatibility, but I can't help but wonder how much of it was simply browser wars and different factions refusing to cooperate. In 2008, Internet Explorer still held majority of the web, Firefox was a big player and Chrome had just barely entered the scene.