he question of how much support Microsoft intends to give JavaScript as a Web development language became murkier yesterday, perhaps inadvertently, when a statement made by the company's chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, was cited out of context by press sources. The citation by itself made it appear that Silverlight, Microsoft's new cross-platform runtime environment for Web applications, would at some point be competing with AJAX as though that technology were exclusively Google's.

The comment in question is as follows: "We're announcing today that we're bringing .NET technology together with Silverlight, and that Silverlight is being transformed into an amazingly powerful cross-platform extension to our entire .NET development and design environment, specifically factored to run in a browser. The Web over the last years has been mostly about AJAX, about increasing the richness of the user experience through the magic of DHTML, and clever browser hackery. But AJAX development has its limitations, and certainly there are better languages than JavaScript to use for many of the sophisticated apps that developers want to build. In this respect, Silverlight changes the game by giving you a new choice for developing incredibly sophisticated, rich Internet applications in the language of your choice."