"Microsoft published an outline of what they were trying to achieve, which is using markup languages to build applications," said Hakon Wium Lie, chief technology officer at Opera Software, that company's representative on W3C's advisory committee, and a WHAT-WG founder. "We thought we could do the same thing with existing Web languages. People were writing applications like Amazon and Hotmail and Google search, so why not have a specification for it?"
One benefit of working with JavaScript and HTML, say proponents, is the preponderance of experienced developers as compared with Flash developers or specialists in other systems. Flash, while widely distributed, isn't as universal as a Web browser, and some developers say their clients fret about Flash-incompatible firewalls.
Some developers mix and match. The popular online photo site Flickr, for example, uses Flash for some tasks and JavaScript for others on the same page.
Passing fad?
Technologists working on the next generation of Web application technologies scoff at the idea that a JavaScript renaissance is going to threaten their vision of the future. Instead, they insist Google's rising tide is lifting their boats.
"For a company serving that many people at that scale, Google is taking uncharacteristic risks on their front end to do things that other companies with old infrastructures in place don't know are even possible," said Laszlo's Temkin. "I'm incredibly happy that Google is taking this step, because it's forcing the market to realise what to us has been incredibly obvious about rich Internet applications. It's forcing the portals and others to notice the value here. That's tremendous for us."
By the same token, Google denies any ideological attachment to its standards-based approach. Instead, the company says it has evaluated all the options before it and will continue to do so as new technologies become available or existing ones get refined.
The JavaScript approach, Google acknowledges, leaves some things to be desired. For example, it's harder to integrate applications with third-party applications.
In the final analysis, however, Google has given JavaScript that crucial programming designation: good enough.
"We've considered these other things, and we've talked about some of the other options, but thus far the technologies haven't gotten to the point where we feel the need to switch to them," said Paul Buchheit, the Google engineer who spearheaded the Gmail project.
"If something like Avalon or Mozilla's XUL (Extensible User Interface Language) were to become powerful and common enough, that would be interesting to us," Buchheit said.
Ultimately, any push away from JavaScript and other DHTML technologies may stem less from the improvement of other options than from the demands of the applications.
"Google is a first step or second step, not an end point," Temkin said. "The successors to Word and Excel and Powerpoint are not going to be written this way. It's just not going to happen."
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