Day 2 Keynote: “Good Morning… btw, the WWW sucks.”

Ok, he didn’t really say that in so many words but that was pretty much what was thrown at us during the opening keynote at 7:30am this morning. The main message: The WWW has problems. Serious problems. It’s not secure, and it just wasn’t built for the kinds of Web 2.0 applications that are becoming increasingly popular. But, on the other hand… it works, and for a lot of people that’s ok. However, keynote speaker Douglas Crockford from Yahoo seems to believe that the end of the world wide web may be at hand and other technologies such as AIR, Silverlight, or JavaFX may be there ready to compete for dominance if new standards that fix these issues aren’t put in place within the next decade. Ultimately he said that the DOM and Javascript need to be replaced all together… which is definitely no small task.

Also of note, he mentioned jsLint, a javascript verifier, as well as Google’s Caja and Cajita to help safely allow javascript-enabled third-party widgets in mashups, but this isn’t a viable solution for securing RIAs.