The Lessons of AJAX: Will History Repeat Itself When it Comes to Adoption of XAML/Avalon?

Hello,

   Microsoft .NET XML Program Manager Dare Obasanjo writes in the blog 
story titled "The Lessons of AJAX: Will History Repeat Itself When it 
Comes to Adoption of XAML/Avalon?":

   If Web browsers such as Firefox had not cloned Microsoft's 
proprietary APIs in a way made it easy to write what were formerly IE 
specific applications in a cross-browser manner then AJAX wouldn't be 
the hip buzzword du jour. This brings me to Microsoft's next generation 
of technologies for building rich internet applications; Avalon and XAML.

A few months ago, C|Net ran an article entitled Will AJAX help Google 
Clean Up? 
<http://news.com.com/Will+AJAX+help+Google+clean+up/2100-1032_3-5621010.html> In 
the article the following statement was attributed to a Microsoft 
representative

    "It's a little depressing that developers are just now wrapping
    their heads around these things we shipped in the late 20th
    century," said Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's general manager for
    platform technologies. "But XAML is in a whole other class. This
    other stuff is very kludgy, very hard to debug. We've seen some
    pretty impressive hacks, but if you look at what XAML starts to
    solve, it's a major, major step up."

Based on how adoption of DHTML/AJAX occured over the past few years I 
suspect that Avalon/XAML will follow a similar path since the initial 
conditions are similar. If I am correct then even if Avalon/XAML is a 
superior technology to DHTML/AJAX (which I believe to be the case) it 
will likely be shunned on the Web due to lack of cross-browser 
interoperability but may flourish within homogenous intranets. This 
shunning will continue until suitable clones for the functionality of 
Avalon/XAML appears for other browsers. In which case as soon as some 
highly visible pragmatist 
<http://software.ericsink.com/Act_Your_Age.html> adopts the technology 
then it will become acceptable. However it is unclear to me that cloning 
XAML/Avalon is really feasible especially if the technology is evolved 
at a regular pace as opposed to being let languish as Microsoft's 
DHTML/AJAX technologies have been. This would mean that Avalon/XAML 
would primarily be an intranet technology used by internal businesses 
applications and some early adopter websites as was the case with 
DHTML/AJAX. The $64,000 question for me is whether this is a desirable 
state of affairs for Microsoft and if not what should be done 
differently to prevent it?

   Source: 
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CommentView.aspx?guid=b9530cd2-4fd3-4321-9289-ba37538dc031

    Any thoughts? Any comments?

    - Gerald

PS: Over a year ago Dare Obasanjo wrote:

sigh

I'm very curious as to where this XAML is intended to replace HTML meme 
started. All I've ever heard about XAML is that it is the new way to 
write Windows client apps. Your question is like asking where is the 
equivalent of doing "Dynamic HTML" in a Windows Forms application like 
RSS Bandit, the answer to that questions is "Why would I have to do that?"

DHTML arose because HTML was about static content. GUI widgets for the 
typical operating system are by definition not static. 

I'll keep saying, the biggest mistake the XAML folks made was basing it 
on markup (XML specifically). Now everyone expects it to act like their 
favorite markup language. Funny enough, if I ever have to edit XAML by 
hand I'll consider it a failing of the next (next) version of Visual Studio.

Source: http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1644.html



-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by: NEC IT Guy Games.  How far can you shotput
a projector? How fast can you ride your desk chair down the office luge track?
If you want to score the big prize, get to know the little guy.  
Play to win an NEC 61" plasma display: http://www.necitguy.com/?r=20