Another Ignoramus For Ajax

I recently posted an article entitled, Really Idiotic Approaches to RIA to point out how 1980s the proprietary Rich Internet Application solutions from Microsoft (Silverlight) and Adobe (Flex) are.

Not surprisingly, this elicited predictably troll-ish "contributions" in my comment section, including one which opened with "you are an ignoramus." After I had looked up ignoramus in the dictionary (no, it is not an absent-minded dinosaur), I thought a bit about how Ajax looks from troll-land.

The argument for Silverlight and Flex is that Ajax is bad because it is not cross browser. Let’s examine that for a second. Cross browser at this point is really shorthand for “runs the same on Firefox and Explorer.”

When we parse that a bit more, we find that many of the cross-browser problems come from Microsoft’s poor implementation of the standards. And hey, whadda you know, Microsoft benefits from its poor implementation by getting witless developers to adopt their proprietary, Microsoft-only solution as a reward for Microsoft’s poor implementation.

And if you feel that Microsoft should not be rewarded for this kind of behavior, but do not have the weight of the EU behind you to slap a $600M fine on them, you can always choose a different proprietary solution and get locked into Adobe forever.

So the argument against Ajax, if I understand it, is that this open-source thing is just a crock, that nobody will ever get the cross-platform right, and the sooner we all just capitulate and fold up our tents, the sooner the caps-lock trolls will leave us alone? I think I'd rather stay an ignoramus.