It would have been the application platform people ask for, with a separate namespace for application-related tags so you can just switch them up with the OS's native UI controls.
Instead of that, we got Yet Another VM, WebAssembly.
Never mind that when Microsoft licensed Java from Sun for IE3 and IE4, Sun sued Microsoft. Sun wanted to be the only distributor of Java, just like Adobe was with Flash. So, browsers wouldn't have actually included a Java runtime out of the box without licensing/paying Sun for it. I'm sure that dependency would have only gotten even better under Oracle.
Those of us old enough to remember the web with plugins, don't miss plugins.
I don't necessarily like the JVM, it's just the most popular system-independent bytecode virtual machine (and historically plausible). It's a lot easier to built a bytecode interpreter than a full language. As mentioned elsethread, Scheme would have been even better, with an even smaller base.
XHTML, however, full in. Namespaces and syntax checking alone would have been worth it.
> Never mind that when Microsoft licensed Java from Sun for IE3 and IE4, Sun sued Microsoft.
Microsoft was in their peak EEE era, no wonder Sun didn't want to do anything with that.
> Those of us old enough to remember the web with plugins, don't miss plugins.
That's why I didn't mention plugins, browsers would have a JVM engine, instead of a JS one.
Think of how truly horrendous it would be if every browser had the JVM built in and Oracle was calling the shots on the language the whole web is written on? How much would they be charging for a license?