Joking, right? Not completely. At PDC last week Microsoft Group Vice President Jim Allchin announced the Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere, which is a subset of XAML, the XML language used to create GUI applications in the next generation of Windows. WPF/E will be implemented as a browser plug-in, will run cross-platform, and will be driven by Javascript rather then .NET.

There are a lot of questions about WPF/E. We don't know what "Everywhere" means, except that it does include Safari on the Mac. We don't know whether Sparkle, code-name for the forthcoming XAML design tool, will be able to create files that are compativle with WPF/E. We don't know how well it will handle key areas like multimedia and animation, especially when compared to Flash (I enjoyed this post by Macromedia's John Dowdell where he suggests that Microsoft implement it with a SWF wrapper).

Even so, if (and it's a big if) Microsoft implements WPF/E for a broad range of browsers, operating systems and devices, and persuades people to install it, then it has a cross-platform strategy that goes a little beyond plain web applications. Personally I doubt it will achieve either of these goals. My guess is that WPF/E will mainly be used for older Windows boxes, Windows CE devices, and maybe Mac support on mixed Windows and Mac intranets.