Firstly my apologies for not posting more. Hopefully a more regular schedule will resume shortly.
Just came across this. Kind of funny, but not at all untrue. I've seen posting around the web lately saying that with AJAX and all the toolkits that are available, the web as a platform is now a pleasure to develop for. Well, or stuff to that effect.
This is nonsense.
Just because you can include AJAXy stuff in pages easily, doesn't mean that the whole thing is easy. Just because you can get a basic app to work using Ruby on Rails, doesn't mean that's its all smooth sailing. Reality is all of this stuff is still hard. AJAX still cuts across at least 4 development paradigms: Serverside (whatever platform you pick), Client-side Javascript, Client-side DOM and Client-side CSS.
Website development (i.e. non-web-app stuff), as the tongue-in-cheek graph in the link shows, is still a nightmare. It also isn't much better now than, say, 3 years ago. It might be the best we have, but that doesn't mean it doesn't suck.
CSS' way of looking at the world isn't that of a designer. It's that simple. You can learn to think the way CSS does, and there are many sources out there to help you, but getting for a design to a site just isn't straight-forward at all (to ward off any possible flaming from people: I've been doing CSS design for donkeys years, both commercial and as a hobby).
I'm not saying that it is impossible to do anything with CSS, just that it is way harder than a layout specification language needs to be.
When you are creating web applications, especially the custom ones, used on intranets (of which my company does a lot), it gets way, way, worse. Sure the Javascript toolkits help. A lot even. But functionality that is basic in desktop-development, still take a lot of time to do on the web.
No sliders, no drag and drop, no grid-views, etc. You can simulate all these with the right UI toolkits and all that, but still...if you evaluate the whole stack of technologies objectively it is clear that this stuff really should just "be there" and "just work".
WhatWG, W3C HTML 5 and all that are slow, yes I know. Changing something as large as the web takes time too. Sure.
However, Silverlight and Flex/AIR do provide these things. And a hell of a lot more besides. Flex is almost trivially easy to use, compared to the whole regular web-stack. It is available on all platforms (as is Silverlight) and it does what it needs to do without any fuss.
Will they work for the web at large? Probably not. But you haven't looked at these technologies in depth, you really should now. Check your preconceptions at the door though, and you'll find out just how much better the web could be if we had technologies for it that we actually designed to do the things people nowadays actually want from it...
