I'm not sure what the Web will look like in a couple of years, regarding the user interfaces. As you certainly know, Microsoft is and will be pushing Silverlight (previously known as WFP/E), to which Abode is responding by opening up Flex, an increasingly popular development tools for Flash. If Flash is everywhere today and Silverlight is going to spread even before getting out of the beta stage, I'd bet that an increasingly relevant role will be that of "native" web applications. With native I mean HTML plus CSS plus JavaScript, with all of the latest bells and whistles. If this might not be true for the more graphical oriented site, for the front end of business applications I think native will be big.

I was promising some more thoughts on Silverlight and co, and will get to those sooner or later. For the time being, the broad topic of this blog post is an excuse to show you a simple demo I made for a friend showing what can be done with JavaScript (namely using the powerful jQuery library, a library I'm getting to like more and more). Although it has nothing to do with Ajax per se, the demo is on my ajax site, at the address:

http://ajax.marcocantu.com/AjaxFade/default.html

What the page shows is images fading. Two images fade in and out in the same location at the same time, producing a rather nice effect. Use the two links on the side to see it. There is also some simpler text fading you can see clicking on the button at the bottom of the page. Nothing astonishing, of course, but certainly quite interesting as a proof-of-concept.

PS. Two strikes in an Athens night (Pippo! Pippo!) and AC Milan is Europe's king. For the 7th time. Wow.