using opengl you should not have a lot of trouble with FPS for a simple HUD , no ? just disable zbuffer and draw it.
1. Find a way to pass the information to an external "text box" to the right of my GLCanvas(viewport), but I'm not exactly sure how to do that. I do know how to use Swing but I'm not sure exactly how to do it for applets, especially with a GLCanvas already on it.
and I am not really sure I undertand what you're trying to do

2. Is it possible to pass information from an applet to say, PHP or HTML or JavaScript actively on a page? I wouldn't see how, or if it'd be worth it. I just figured I'd ask.
look at liveconnect : JSObject or this.showDocument("javascript:alert('')")