A commenter on the ARAX article on eWEEK's site named Gary Edwards said,
"It seems to me that Adobe and Microsoft are using the browser plug-in
model as a distribution channel for their proprietary run-time engines. Or should
we call them VMs [virtual machines]?
"The easiest way for Web developers to sidestep problematic browser
wars, and still be able to push the envelope of the interactive Web, may well
be to write to a universal run-time plug-in like Adobe AIR
or Microsoft Silverlight. IMHO, the 'browser' quickly fades away once this
direct development sets in."
Moreover, Edwards said, "Although there are many ways to slice this
discussion, it might be useful to compare Adobe RIA [Rich Internet
Applications] and Microsoft Silverlight RIA in terms of Web-ready, highly
interactive documents. The Adobe RIA story is quite different from that of
Silverlight. Both however exploit the shortcomings of browsers; shortcomings
that are in large part, I think, due to the disconnect the browser community
has had with the W3C [World Wide Web Consortium]. The W3C forked off the HTML-CSS
[Cascading Style Sheets] path, putting the bulk of their attention into XML,
RDF and the Semantic Web. The Web developer community stayed the course, pushing
the HTML-CSS envelope with JavaScript and
some rather stunning CSS magic.
"Adobe seems to have picked up the HTML-CSS-JavaScript
trail with a Microsoft innovation to take advantage of browser cache, DHTML
(Dynamic HTML). DHTML morphs into AJAX,
(which [is] so wild as to have difficulty scaling). And AJAX
gets tamed by an Adobe-Apple sponsored WebKit."
"....One of the more interesting characters in the recent standards battles has been Gary Edwards: he was a member of the original ODF TC in 2002 which oversaw the creation of ODF 1.0 in 2005, but gradually became more concerned about large vendor dominance of the ODF TC frustrating what he saw as critical improvements in the area of interoperability. This compromised the ability of ODF to act as a universal format."
"....Edwards increasingly came to believe that the battleground had shifted, with the SharePoint threat increasingly needing to be the focus of open standards and FOSS attention, not just the standalone desktop applications: I think Edwards tends to see Office Open XML as a stalking horse for Microsoft to get its foot back in the door for back-end systems....."
"....Edwards and some colleagues split with some acrimony from the ODF effort in 2007, and subsequently see W3C's Compound Document Formats (CDF) as holding the best promise for interoperability. Edwards' public comments are an interesting reflection of an person evolving their opinion in the light of experience, events and changing opportunities...."
".... I have put together some interesting quotes from him which, I hope, fairly bring out some of the themes I see. As always, read the source to get more info: ..... "