I'm starting to look at Avalon, the presentation system within Longhorn, the next-gen operating system from Microsoft. All of what I'm about to say is public; no privileged information.

This interview Joe Beda: Is Avalon a way to take over the Web? and the subsequent discussion gives a decent picture of how Avalon fits into the web technologies strategy.

Joe Beda's article describes and responds to a variety of dicussion that emerged based on the interview. He includes the ridiculous claim, "in some ways you can thank Microsoft for enabling a mostly standards based web by making the browser a two horse race." Thank Microsoft for pushing standards? Hello? Maybe if you mean Microsoft standards. (I could go into a detailed analysis of that claim, but it's tangential, and thus left as an exercise for the reader.) A more helpful quote is, "Avalon, and Longhorn in general, is our attempt to reenergize the rich client at Microsoft." Aha! So that's what Avalon is!

More to follow-- there's an awful lot of stuff out there.