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The Farm has a lengthy, but very interesting overview of innovations in today’s Web Application domain. It touches on everything from XMLHttpRequest to Ajax.

The thing that is most interesting to me is that “HTML as the new API” sure seems to fulfill many of the promises that Java (and applets, in particular) failed to deliver. I’ll re-quote what I think is the heart of the matter with regards to web-based applications:

With web-based software, most users won’t have to think about anything except the applications they use.

It’s easy enough to do - there are so many varied and powerful tools and technologies - there is no reason not to do it (where applicable).