Re: Does not look like a good proposition for desktop app developers
I remember ActiveX depressingly well, thank you. I even remember in-browser vbscript although to do so makes my neck spasm.
Microsoft were wrong about ActiveX (due to security issues) but I can see where they grew the idea from. It's exactly the sort of thing that somebody who doesn't think about security would see as an evolution of cgi-bin, moving the grunt-work to the client and thus getting the whole idea of http completely arse-backwards.
Still, it did give us XmlHttpRequest without which it would be a very different world.