I've been reading Patrick Logan's blog for a while now and he's recently shown a lot of positive interest in Adobe's Apollo and a lot of discord towards Microsoft's Silverlight. The most interesting thing about his blog posts is that he argues that Apollo is Web-like in contrast to folks like Mike Shaver of Mozilla. His most recent post Unfounded Panic Ensues is a good snapshot into his current thinking and is excerpted below

The panic continues from really smart people (more than one), for some unknown reason...

how is that different than the bad old days when a site was developed for one particular browser?

I really have trouble understanding the concern. When I read about Flex and Apollo the first and most important aspects that caught my attention was the *emphasis* on being web compliant.

The point *is* to write web compliant services and run them through many kinds of web clients. Apollo is just one and should not be leading to locked in service providers.

That would be dumb and missing the point of the web.

Now contrast this with the post by Mike Shaver entitled the high cost of some free tools where he writes

If someone tells you that their platform is the web, only better, there is a very easy test that you can use:
...
When the tool spits out some bundle of shining Deployment-Ready Code Artifact, do you get something that can be mashed up, styled, scripted, indexed by search engines, read aloud by screen readers, read by humans, customized with greasemonkey, reformatted for mobile devices, machine-translated, excerpted, transcluded, edited live with tools like Firebug? Or do you get a chunk of dead code with some scripted frills about the edges, frozen in time and space, until you need to update it later and have to figure out how to get the same tool setup you had before, and hope that the platform is still getting security and feature updates? (I’m talking to you, pre-VB.NET Visual Basic developers.)

It seems the reason lots of folks disagree with Patrick Logan is that his definition of "The Web" is different from theirs. From his perspective, the Web is about RESTful usage of HTTP and any client platform that can interact with HTTP in a RESTful manner is Web-like. Others like Mike Shaver consider the whole enchilada of HTTP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript to be what constitutes the Web experience.

In Patrick Logan's world, the Web browser (e.g. Firefox) is just one of many kinds of Web clients. In Mike Shaver's world, the Web browser is the Web client so the power and limitations of the browser define the Web experience.

I don't think one opinion is right and the other is wrong. I do think that understanding the different perspectives will be useful for Web developers as we navigate the RIA future.