> wanted to be able to use the power of the browser for standalone, cross-platform desktop applications.
considering the power of the browsers is to run web applications, it makes sense that the standard and cross-platform APIs they expose are web APIs.
> Imagine you chose to build an IDE using Webkit and it lets you access everything via JS api that you could access using Cocoa or GTK+.
You've got XUL, you've got webviews, you've got node bindings for Qt, wx or opengl. If you want to write desktop applications in javascript there's no dearth of ways to do it.
OP
> wanted to be able to use the power of the browser for standalone, cross-platform desktop applications.
considering the power of the browsers is to run web applications, it makes sense that the standard and cross-platform APIs they expose are web APIs.
> Imagine you chose to build an IDE using Webkit and it lets you access everything via JS api that you could access using Cocoa or GTK+.
You've got XUL, you've got webviews, you've got node bindings for Qt, wx or opengl. If you want to write desktop applications in javascript there's no dearth of ways to do it.