I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Blair Wright sent me this link.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
read the Enter the Web section.
It’s not that Microsoft didn’t notice this was happening. Of course they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared; they have been completely missing in action for several years. There’s no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it’s just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client.
Also on Loosley Coupled …
Nobody involved in these and other similar initiatives is fooling themselves that they can do everything that’s required in the browser as we know it today. But they do believe that they can get there by building on today’s browser technology as a foundation, which is a route Microsoft explicitly rejected when it halted work on DHTML.
So the question is: Can browser based applications be stopped?
For many tasks (Word Processing, Graphic Design etc) a thick installed client is of course required, but for many business applications rich browser based applications are so desirable for their zero deployment effort that this area cannot be stopped. As the next version of Windows is still several years away the trend for richer browser based applications will continue. DHTML was never perfect but it was good enough before development was halted.
ASP.Net allows very talented people to hide DHTML complexity in controls, so there is enough there now for many years of business application innovation.
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