ironically, java applets provided via the JVM a way to run multiplatform, perhaps not all applets off a single JVM - I don't remember exactly if each java applet used its own JVM, but it wouldn't be a radical departure to have the JVM run multiple applets, cross platform, which is the entire reason the JVM was invented.

Now instead of the JVM, we've these rather beefy runtimes due to Chrome, Node.JS, Javascript (v8)... which if you look at it, do the same things applets did, except different.

I think the problem w/cross platform is that we want to have everything look 'native' for the platform.. and when you demand that, hooking into the native APIs is sort of inevitable. Instead, I believe rendering probably ought to be done by the runtimes themselves, sort of like JVM did w/AWT/Swing..or like Dart is doing right now.

There's always going to be a trade off when wanting to have a single app that runs cross platform and maintain a native look/feel to it... Quite frankly, I'm not sure which is best, but I lean more toward 'do your own rendering' and port the runtime to run across platforms, kind of like the JVM ...except w/Chromium/V8/Node.JS. Sure it hogs memory and its slow... but I think most devs will take that over having to develop multiple apps doing the same thing per platform.