You're right. Flash, Silverlight, Java applets, and Java Flex were all designed to solve these problems, but all of them suffer from the same problems: Their ow

You're right. Flash, Silverlight, Java applets, and Java Flex were all designed to solve these problems, but all of them suffer from the same problems: Their owners seek to control the platform and it has put users in a weird spot. Linux users can'tuse silverlight without resorting to Mono, Adobe doesn't provide flash for them either, as well as the whole mobile issue, and everyone still has a bad taste in their mouth from their experience with Java applets in the late 90s. We've learned a lot in the past decade watching the WWW mature, and if there's one lesson to be taken away, it's that open standards are necessary for a healthy web.