DHTML is Better... Told You So

jd (Macromedian) points out this post by Tim Bray:

“At Antarctica, for version 3.0 of Visual Net, we added a Flash-based user interface to our traditional HTML flavor. For 4.0, which ships sometime before end-of-year, we’ll be backing it out and sticking to dynamic HTML. It’s the right thing to do, but the choice wasn’t a slam-dunk...we found that real customers doing real installations ended up going for the HTML version every time.“

Two main reasons were browser integration and speed. #1 isn't such a huge deal from my point of view, as JD points out, you can integrate the back buttons with anchors (but this only works in MX). Still, the 2nd is the main problem. As Tim points out, the common theory is that your app will perform better with a flash based UI, because you are only sending data back and forth, which gets parsed by the UI, and then rendered on the screen (instead of performing all the rendering logic server side). However, the fact of the matter is that Flash chokes when parsing XML (similar to calling a web service from a .NET CF app). Still, this isn't the only problem. The UI rendering is slow as hell, so even if you overcome the XML loading problems, you have a major usability problem (once again, I point to Lazslo as a good example of this). When using DHTML, the rendering is lightning fast, and you can databind your XML on the server side if the client can't handle processing it for some strange reason (which isn't going to be the case in my experience, unless you are doing downlevel stuff).