One area of debate is whether JavaScript and other DHTML technologies wind up making development easier or more complex than newer systems over the course of an application's lifetime.
Some purveyors of alternate methods point out that HTML was designed to build hypertext documents, and is now being jerry-rigged to create interactive applications. That, they claim, results in more development difficulties and compatibility issues, a harder quality assurance cycle, and the absence of prefabricated, higher-level building blocks.
"It is really, really, really hard to build something like Gmail and Google Maps," said David Mendels, general manager of platform products for Macromedia. "Google hired rocket scientists--they hired Adam Bosworth, who invented DHTML when he was at Microsoft. Most companies can't go and repeat what Google has done."
That level of difficulty might explain why it's taken until 2005 for some 1990s-era Web technologies to become more popular, said Peter O'Kelly, an analyst with the Burton Group. Renewed interest is "partly because of some clever approaches that have been recently exploited and partly because it has been exceptionally difficult to master the underlying technologies," he said.
It isn't just Google advocating the blast-from-the-past approach. Sentiment in favor of status quo methods erupted into a schism within the W3C, where a splinter group called the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHAT-WG) rebelled against the W3C's XForms vision of Web forms--a crucial component of Web-based applications--and drafted its own specification to standardize currently widespread techniques.
That consortium of browser developers--including Apple Computer, Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation, whose working group representative Brendan Eich invented JavaScript--is also developing a Web application specification geared toward stitching together JavaScript, HTML, CSS and the W3C's Document Object Model for letting scripts act on individual parts of a Web page.
The group formed last year in part to respond to the potential threat posed by Microsoft's plans for the proprietary XAML/Avalon Web application coding system that, if successful, could marginalize standard approaches.
"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.
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