It should be required that anyone who says "Write once, run everywhere" must write an essay about how they avoid the Java pitfall: "We look consistent everywhere -- but consistently crappy."
JavaScript has almost solved this problem, if one views HTML and CSS as the domain-specific languages which JavaScript deploys for rendering its GUIs. You have to know a lot of quirks, but when you finish a site which looks nice in Firefox you can have a reasonable assurance that it doesn't look absolutely horrible in WebKit browsers.
What's more surprising is that it has come this close to solving that problem, but I don't remember anyone ever promising JavaScript as something of this nature. There exists some JavaScript pride today, especially with CoffeeScript and Node.js, but since at least my first internship in the summer of 1999 it has been faced with inconsistency and standardization pains -- and I don't remember anyone before that time promising that you could run the same HTML/CSS/JS everywhere. By those standards it's more of a 15-year goal than an initial pitch.
JavaScript has almost solved this problem, if one views HTML and CSS as the domain-specific languages which JavaScript deploys for rendering its GUIs. You have to know a lot of quirks, but when you finish a site which looks nice in Firefox you can have a reasonable assurance that it doesn't look absolutely horrible in WebKit browsers.
What's more surprising is that it has come this close to solving that problem, but I don't remember anyone ever promising JavaScript as something of this nature. There exists some JavaScript pride today, especially with CoffeeScript and Node.js, but since at least my first internship in the summer of 1999 it has been faced with inconsistency and standardization pains -- and I don't remember anyone before that time promising that you could run the same HTML/CSS/JS everywhere. By those standards it's more of a 15-year goal than an initial pitch.