Hehe, I still think that ActiveX was a better idea :) I was against that
technology once, but here's my way of how I learned to understand the
intention of it and why do I think it wasn't that bad:
VIM (a code editor) may be compiled on windows, although it's a console
application, so far gVIM exists I thought it should be possible to stick the
editor window to a Windows form if, say, I can get VIM in a shape of COM
object. I then learned from VIM sources, that it was once been able to do
that - it had an option to be compiled with OLE support. These days OLE is
an obsolete technology, and there isn't much help on it if you will search
MSDN. Any place you come across OLE it would say that ActiveX is the
successor and you should use it instead. Reading more on this subject, gives
you better understanding of the intention of why it was developed (I don't
think it was developed in a very friendly way btw). But, one thing sure -
the intention was to design an interface for a foreign program to run inside
and communicate with Windows program. Explorer is just a particular case.
It was relatively easy to conform to OLE requirements when not using MS
tools - that's why VIM has it, but it became increasingly difficult to
conform to ActiveX requirement. Well, ActiveX is more feature reach and more
advanced in other regards, but it's not achieving its goal because it didn't
became a standard interface for linking and embedding :)
If you want the analogy in Flash world - think of a pure AS3 code
cooperating with Flex framework. A straight forward example - make your
display object be a valid candidate to be added into Flex display list -
implement IUIComponent... yeah, right, I would give up doing this, it's to
much work and most of it, if not all you don't want to do. I don't think
that Flex engineers have thought about it in this aspect, and I think that
MS engineers spoiled a potentially good idea by poor implementation...
Bottom line: I would be much happier to see MS coming up with some
alternative to ActiveX, then wasting time on HTML5. Maybe they need HTML5 to
not to loose in the browsers battle (because of marketing / advertising and
so on), but as I've said in another post, I don't see it as a way internet
wants to be in the future. HTML5 is just another swine flu, which is given
way much more attention than it's worth IMO.
