RIA Platform Mess
It should be a surprise to nobody that when the New York Times announced it was dropping Silverlight for Adobe Air the internets didn’t spring into action intelligently debating the NYT’s technical decision and arguing the merits of both platforms. Instead the internets focused on two things:
1. Microsoft is the cause of all suffering of the world.
2. If a technology stack isn’t open source and subscribes to a set of standards it is also the responsible for all the suffering in the world.
In this discussion thread on reddit.com you can clearly see that the entire tech world is mightily confused and mystified by the RIA solutions that exist right now. Air and Silverlight are bad because they aren’t open source. SVG, Html, Javascript are bad because the implementations of that technology aren’t ubiquitous across all browsers. So in reality if your developing a RIA application at the moment you can use two relatively new and closed projects by two of the biggest ( and therefore evil ) companies in the world or you can use a wild west of a browser based stack and hope your app doesn’t break between nightly builds.
It seems to me that if your building a RIA application you’ve really got to put a lot of faith in your implemenation provider whether it be the Mozilla or Adobe. You really risk complete doom for your application no matter which RIA stack your attempting to use. All of them are unproven, nobody is using them for anything other than YATC ( yet another twitter client ), except for Basalmiq mockups, and your one patch or build away from everything breaking.
It seems the responsible and safe choice for RIA platform development right now is to focus on a stack that can work on an easily deployable like say Silverlight 2.whatever and Google Chrome, of Firefox Nightly 1.2939 and SVG/Html/Javascript and and just take any cross platform compatibility you get as a bonus.
My opinion is that if your attempting for some kind of cross platform magical idealist goals your just going to be fighting the same battles over and over again as the vendor of your RIA application releases patches and such. For me I’m really fucking tired of fighting this war with Css/Html and I have no intentions of repeating that fight. Especially since this time I’m dealing with a lot more complexity than making a logo float over there and getting my div’s to clear correctly.