For some time I thought widgets were the latest marketing trick and pretty useless. Now I think they can actually be really useful (and fun) for creating simple applications using HTML, ECMAScript and CSS. Well, and SVG, if you insist. (Also known as open formats, for those who care about that sort of thing.) What do you prefer, writing C++ for some crap OS that you probably have to port to a lot of different platforms or a simple HTML hack that just works?
Widgets 1.0 is an attempt to find common grounds between various widgets implementations and standardize those. It’s the first public Working Draft and by no means finished (in fact, it has lots of open issues) and all input will be taken into consideration. Lots of the initial editing has been done by Arve and Charles “travel monkey” McCathieNevile and hopefully Marcos will do the rest. The relevant mailing list is public-webapi@w3.org.