flash,silverlight and (curiously late entrant)javafx fight it out

my pick for a winner would be microsoft, except a funny thing happens..

in this desperate race, someone hits on the idea of supporting a markup protocol called html -you may have heard of it

they figure a) the more grist they can find for their mill the better -b)they can extend html to include their native markup, thus creating a glide path

suddenly they find that throughput of “native” markup is dwarfed by html, and they are the new web browser on the block, eating IE share from the inside out

the other RIA platforms have to follow suit, even if they desperately don’t want to

***at this point we realise the the whole RIA fuss was all due to the arrested development of html -arrested by microsoft using the market share of IE -and who can blame them when everything they do for IE is a gift for google et al***

but now the brakes are off -using IE as your browser no longer means that IE is your browser

i can author a page in html and nominate the browser plugin to render it

i can write a rich client app in java that does for real, what google web toolkit only fakes (a java html browser)

html goes from its current state of “well that’s nice but if IE doesn’t do it then..” to “i never thought i would be writing to your magazine”

the html standard rockets forward to fill that same vacuum that RIAs plan to fill

which ushers in an html renaissance

and that little paperclip thing in office turns into a real boy and ends poverty by making low cost keyboards with just one key that allow 26 poor people to work collaboratively

and we wake up and it turns out to be all just a dream

I’m all for better standards, all else being equal. The reality is until the VMs are on users desktops, they are quite irrelevant. XForms was talked about back in 1999, and where we are today? Hacked up javascript manipulating DOM divs.

Stephen,

I can’t argue with statistics. You are absolutely right. HTML beat Flash hands down in sheer deployment figures.

But this is like saying 99% of phone usage is around people talking to each other, and not IVR. HTML is to the browser what the mouth is to the telephone.

It’s not useful to claim HTML is beating other platforms on the browser because HTML defines the browser and the browser defines HTML.

The real question is: what kinds of applications are we not seeing more of on the web, and why not? For instance, uploading photos is still a pain on HTML. Another example is serious data entry apps, with lots of validation screens. How many times do you encounter a screen that says “please press submit once, or your credit card will be charged twice?”. You can’t develop a serious line of business app (Bank teller app for instance) if your operators risk making that kind of errors.

Aristotle hosted a discussion on this topic a few years ago and Aunt Daisy continues today to ask, “Why can’t the damn thing just do what I want it to do? Nothing more and nothing less”!

Maintain a list of the SBC product offerings worldwide. Many of them you did not reference in the post and comments. Many are not worth noting, now or perhaps never. But they have presence on the Web and have thrown their hat into the ring