Are Silverlight and Apollo really the future of the web?

It's not on the front page (because it has little to do with Java), but there's an interesting theme going on in the web world that we'd be wise to pay attention to, and that's the emergence of several rich-client would-be successors to HTML and Ajax. The Dive Into Mark blog calls this the Silly Season, castigating Microsoft for trying to "recreate the web in their own image" with Silverlight , and Adobe for trying to do the same thing with Apollo. Both of them try to impose their proprietary runtimes, graphics and animations frameworks, video codecs, etc., and are tied up in restrictive licenses. Also, the clients only run on recent versions of Mac and Windows. And Elliotte Rusty Harold slaps Silverlight (actually, I've already switched to the disparaging term Silverfish; do join in the fun) for making the VRML mistake, meaning that they released a dev kit only for Windows and not for Mac (or Linux, or anything else). They apparently believe that the idea of developing for Silverfish is more appealing than the idea of developing on a Mac. As Elliotte writes, "Microsoft expects the creators and consumers to come to them." Yeah, good luck with that, guys.

Not that Java is entirely free of this line of thinking -- ME development is only just now being supported on Linux, and Mac is apparently off the radar. And yes, I did complain about that, almost four years ago.

But back to Mark's blog, there's an interesting hubris in assuming that HTML and Ajax are destined to hit the wall, and soon, and to start lining up proprietary successors now. Heck, didn't some of us look into applets 10 years ago based on similar assumptions about HTML's viability?

And speaking of Java, Mark also writes:

Not to be outdone, Sun is working on an "alternative" to AJAX, because"AJAX sort of deals with all of the old way of doing things. It makes it simpler, which is great, but underneath it’s still all this junky HTML, Document Object Model, CSS, all that stuff." (discussion) To their credit, they claim they will release it as open source, and I'd bet it'll work on Linux, but that's easy to say because it doesn't exist yet.

The first time I read that, I assumed he was referring to F3, but the article he links to is about a "Project Flair", which I hadn't heard of and could be something different. Still, open-source and Linux-compatible are two advantages this has over the proprietary Silverfish and Apollo, though of course the same could be said of Java itself.

So what do you think? Is HTML really doomed as a client-side technology, and is the race to provide a new rich-client technology really going to produce a winner? What about the users? Why do they need this stuff, and what's going to get them to download it (those who even use compatible devices -- sorry all you phone, game console, set-top box, and non-Mac/Win users)?