I know neither desktop programming nor web programming (I do embedded stuff) but as I see it, web apps require an awful mess of ad-hoc technologies (XHTML, CSS,

I know neither desktop programming nor web programming (I do embedded stuff) but as I see it, web apps require an awful mess of ad-hoc technologies (XHTML, CSS, Javascript, some server-side language and framework, SQL, a webserver, etc.) whereas there are powerful, well-designed tools to easily develop desktop software (Visual Studio, Delphi, Python + Qt or wxWidgets, etc.) When you develop embedded software you can choose between a grab-bag of tools (using open source tools like the GNU toolchain; very configurable but rather complicated) or an IDE. It's interesting to have both because, usually the learning cycle is the following: you generally start by using IDEs (when you're at school), then when you start working you like to configure the complete toolchain to learn how everything works and finally, after some time, you're getting really tired of having to do all this stuff manually so you start using IDEs, libraries and the like. That's why I don't understand the idea behind toolkits that let you write desktop apps using web technologies; it seems like you get the worst of both worlds!