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."
It is the consistency of the WebKit document model across all WebKit browsers that makes for an interoperable Open Web future. I would not however discount the importance of Firefox and Opera embracing the WebKit document model (HTML5, CSS4, SVG/Canvas, JavaScript, DOM2). That's our guarantee that the future of the Open Web will actually be open.
Tom goes on to suggest that instead of "AJAX", developers would be better off thinking in terms of "ACHJAX": Asynchronous CSS4 - HTML5 - JavaScript and XML ..... with the focus on getting as much done in CSS4 as possible.