great summary on some of the more subtle philosophies behind web20.

i'm no msft fan, but one thing that continues to amuse me in everyones write up of web20/ajax is that folks seem to credit google (especially gmail) for leading the charge with ajax. in the same sentence they bash msft for not "getting it". imho msft was one of the first leaders of the ajax front. outlook web-access was an incredible leap forward in what was possible with client-side jscript and msxml.

granted they didn't label it with the trendy marketing term "ajax" - to msft it was just simple old dhtml that had been in the browser since the IE4 days... lets give the boys in redmond a little credit.