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You’re still waiting for me to explain what I meant when I referred to JavaScript as a last resort. I hinted at it in the preceding paragraph. Not the part on JavaScript debugging, but my reference to CSS and HTML. These do a lot more than paint screens. They are a browser's client-side framework. Everything they do is handled as native code. In other words, they're fast. CSS3 and HTML5 are too inconsistently implemented (if at all) across browsers to design to unless you're specifically targeting Safari, iPhone, or other WebKit-based browsers.

Microsoft is approaching Silverlight from the opposite direction. It plans to take advantage of its legions of outside developers experienced in writing for its ubiquitous Windows operating system. The next version of Silverlight, being tested now and due later this year, will support Microsoft's .NET framework -- tools used by developers to create desktop applications that work on Windows.

Dojo also has an implementation of the Django templating language, dojox.dtl. This is an extremely powerful template engine that, similar to this one, creates the HTML once, then updates it when the data changes. You simply update the data, call the template.render method, and the HTML is updated - no creating nodes repeatedly, no innerHTML or nodeValue access.

For much of this decade, Web browsing has been dominated by Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), which at its height achieved market share numbers approaching 95%, with the result that Microsoft owned a de facto standard for the Web and held effective veto power over the future of HTML. During much of this period, Microsoft suspended development of IE, with the result that virtually no new features appeared within the world's dominant browser from 2001 to 2006. But while IE was sleeping, one of the biggest phenomena of the computer age happened: Ajax. Clever Web developers discovered gold in them there mountains. Using Ajax techniques, Web developers could create desktop-like rich user interfaces right in the browser. Not only that, Ajax was evolutionary. Ajax offered an incremental path from the industry's existing HTML-based infrastructure and know-how, allowing Web developers to add rich Ajax elements to an existing HTML page.

A companion community effort helping to accelerate the adoption of open standards is the Web Standards Project (http://www.webstandards.org), which is producing a set of "acid tests" that verify browser support for Open Web technologies, such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Acid2 is focused mainly on CSS support, and is now supported by Opera, Safari/WebKit, and IE. Acid3 (http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3) tests DOM scripting, CSS rendering,

Runtime Advocacy Task Force

It's the document model! There is nothing wrong with RiA. Adobe is doing great stuff, and they fully support the WebKit flow document model in their RiA. Silverlight on the other hand is a true threat to the Open Web because it implements uniquely proprietary format, protocol and interface alternatives. The problem with AJAX is that it's difficult to scale. Advancing JavaScript libraries, structured WebKit, BrowserPlus and Google's GWT-Google Gears promise to tame that problem. At the end of the day though, i see AJAX as an important aspect of the browser as an RiA runtime engine. Here's what concerns me; 500 million MSOffice desktops that anchor most of the world's client/server business processes speak XAML "fixed/flow". These desktops are the information pumps for billions of business critical documents. And they do not speak the language of the Open Web. They speak the language of the Microsoft Web-Stack and Mesh services.

Server-side JavaScript (SSJS) is growing in popularity fast since developers realize it can drastically simplify Web app creation by letting you use using the same technology stack on both the client and the server.

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."

What we saw them do was create a single screen application with rich interactivity on the client, but still all of the benefits of being a web based application (nothing to install, back end connectivity for inventory and other data using XML, use of client side media/animation to guide the user, reachable through any browser, etc.) We really looked at this as the best of web applications and the best of desktop applications: rich connectivity, platform independence, no install, lightweight as well as rich client side logic and interactivity, ability to integrate rich media and communications. But we dropped the baggage of the page based metaphor that basically required a page refresh for everything and got beyond the layout/graphics/media constraints of HTML.