Shrug. I think this is a good illustration: it’s not the language that’s the issue, it’s the DOM. The DOM was and continues to be a terrible UI abstraction for applications.
What we really needed was Flex or XAML or Swing or even XUL, for that matter, to be built on a sandbox functional enough to make users happy but robust enough to run on the web. Instead each framework failed in turn to various platform dependency and/or security flaws until we ended up stuck with the DOM as our endgame.
using the examples listed as being needed (like swing and flex), it would seem that they meant a visual components library that has "everything" needed for an app.
The "DOM" in this case is referring to the basic elements of a html page. It's like bricks, for which an app UI could be built, but it will be different for every app (both visually, as well as code-wise).
The thesis in the poster's remarks is that there should've been a common application GUI library for the web.
What we really needed was Flex or XAML or Swing or even XUL, for that matter, to be built on a sandbox functional enough to make users happy but robust enough to run on the web. Instead each framework failed in turn to various platform dependency and/or security flaws until we ended up stuck with the DOM as our endgame.