Ajax Girl

Another Ajax Experience is over. We had a blast and it was a tons of fun to see so many of our friends in the community and to have so much top-notch content. Many thanks to all those who came out, especially the speakers, many of whom came to present at great personal sacrifice. And, a tip of the hat to those who held some announcements for the show, such as:

• Brendan’s monkey triplets
• Adobe’s surprising URL state standards proposal and JavaScript Flash video embedding library
• Steve’s YSlow! library (okay, this went to beta right before the show, but we’re claiming it)
• Greg’s jMaki RC

As the last sessions were wrapping up, a group including Brad Neuberg, Glen Lipka, Alex Russell were seen huddled together in an animated discussion. Glen kindly pointed us to a summary of their chat, which includes what he’s calling “browser possession”:

The most exciting idea, which several people seemed to be noodling on at the same time was what I am loosely calling Browser Possession. It goes like this:

1. You make a web page using HTML, CSS and JS.
2. You test it in ONE browser. Probably Webkit.
3. You include a single JS at the top of your page, a spinoff off of SWFObject.js
4. The JS would instantiate a SWF file which would fill the 100% of the height and width of your browser window.
5. The JS would then suck in the HTML of the page, and feed it to the Flash Movie.
6. Then the Flash movie would instantiate Webkit inside it and render the page.

Glen goes on to simplify the proposal as:

1. Same as above, but instead of a Flash movie, it would be a Webkit native plugin.
2. This would need it’s own JS that was specific to this task.

Back when Adobe started briefing developers on Apollo/AIR, a few of us joked about WebKit running in a plug-in rendering web pages inside of a web browser. Funny to see it proposed as a serious idea.

With ScreamingMonkey proposing essentially the same idea with the JavaScript run-time, it’s interesting to imagine a world where Ajax applications can choose from several HTML renderers and JavaScript run-times, much like IE lets devs choose between the “Quirks” and “Standards” code paths.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/138147235/the-end-of-tae-and-browser-possesion