I'm referring to programmatic interaction with the browsers DOM interface once the document is loaded.
Why? Primarily because Javascript is an awful language. As the emergence of GWT and countless other web 2.0 Javascript API's indicate, there is a lot of work being carried out in Javascript to bring more interactive UI to web pages. There are a number of advantages that introducing other languages thru a .NET or Java VM could bring:
- Javascript is not a language that scales well to larger teams and projects. It's loosely typed, not strictly OO, no standard documentation support, the list goes on.
- Staying within the browser DOM enforces more searchable, indexable semantic content.
- Allowing other server side CGI languages, like Ruby, Perl to interact with the same language on the client side.
Perhaps I'm a bit off topic, this could be more relevant on the Silverlight 3 thread.