Brendan Eich talks about the VM solution (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj49rmc01Hs Slides: http://brendaneich.github.com/Strange-Loop-2012/#/).

I personally believe that HTML is fantastic for what it was designed for: Structured Documents. But the world has gone more interactive and I believe the ad-hoc solution of Javascript, HTML and CSS is not "rich" enough to provide for the users demand.

I like the language independent VM idea as long as it doesn't turn out like bloated Java bytecode.