Longhorn To Open the Era of “Replace and Defend”?

Posted on November 1, 2003

Jon Udell has an interesting piece looking at some of the recently-released specs of Longhorn, the next version of Microsoft Windows (planned for release in 2006), and what it means for the rest of the technology world. He also gives a link to another article by Joe Hewitt, which looks at XAML, Longhorn’s new language to let developers write applications in XML (hmm, where have we seen that idea before?). Hewitt sums up Longhorn’s ambitions thusly:

I think the bottom-line of XAML is that it is equally useful for creating both desktop applications, web pages, and printable documents. This means that Microsoft may be attempting to simultaneously obsolete HTML, CSS, DOM, XUL, SVG, SMIL, Flash, PDF.

Sobering stuff for anybody who cares about the continuing viability and openness of any of those standards.