Light and Shadow
What does a reboot look like? It looks like this (on Firefox, on IE6, it's just totally broken): "No suitable plugins were found". Or this: "to view this video, you must install Silverlight. Click Here to download". I was really amused that the install page asks that you click to download, and actually pops up an alert('click') on Firefox. In case I wasn't sure that I clicked, I suppose. And this: you can download a 1.0 beta or a 1.1 alpha - Google's culture permanent beta is becoming a virus. Everyone's running so fast that they can't be bothered to actually come up with a final release of 1.0 before bumping the minor version number. I'm inclined to wait until Microsoft gets serious about building an actual, you know, release of the thing, but that might mean I wait forever. I think it shows what Microsoft is up against: they want to wow the world with a video presentation of what their new product can do, yet it would hardly be appropriate to use the de-facto standard for displaying video inline on a web page. So rebooting the web is a lot like rebooting a PC circa 1990, only the fonts are prettier.
As a developer, I'd be a lot happier about this if someone could actually explain what all this stuff can do for me, preferably without using bogus overloaded terms like "rich" (gag), or "compelling". Not just Silverlight, I basically understand Flash, and I can understand that MS wants to do with Flash what they did with Java, but now Adobe is talking about Flex and Apollo? Brent actually comes pretty close. I have absolutely no problem with the idea that a desktop app needs to be able to render HTML; in fact, it needs to be able to embed a browser. And frankly, this is at best a pain and at worst impossible, depending on your environment. So now we can be in the browser. What does this mean? Now I can access the file system? I can access different sites without XSS? These are the major restrictions I've run into trying to build (cough) "rich" web pages. Vector Graphics seem to be a solved problem. Displaying videos inline (without launching a separate application), that's hard too. But it's a solved problem, if you're willing to pay. I suspect that I'm setting my sights too low. I approach all this stuff as an interested hobbyist at this point, and my needs and desires are pretty modest. So vector-based graphics, media, text, animation, and overlays, they sound kinda neat, but compelling? I'm a bit too much of a geek for that. Choice of development languages is more my speed, but choosing languages without choice of a platform, not so much.
I've heard some complaining about the cruftiness of DOM, about all the headaches with trying to make Ajax work cross-browser (or more to the point, dealing with inconsistencies in implementation of DOM and XmlHttpRequest). That's the crux of the problem, and there seems to be two solutions. The vendors could try to converge on an existing solution, or they could go their own ways and ask us to invest some real money into having them offer developers a solution. Distinct solutions, but solutions nonetheless. Being commercial enterprises, it's not surprising that we're taken down the road more traveled.