Widget neutrality: The Yahoo Widgets Blog compares different widget-hosting architectures of Apple and Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. The Apple and Microsoft approaches are each specific to their OS -- you'd have to give up part of the audience, or port, when using these architectures. The Google and Yahoo approaches both use XML for configuration and scripting for interactivity, but Google is currently Windows-only while Yahoo works on OS X and three versions of Windows. This article offers bulletpoints of advantages and disadvantages of each approach. My two cents is that one proven way to reduce development costs while not restricting the audience to a particular OS or particular hosting environment is to do the development targeting Adobe Flash Player, hosted within each of the different widget architectures. Reduces learning costs and reduces testing, support and maintainence costs, too. But I don't yet know that the various widget services yet include standard Netscape Plugins in their widget engines... as you might guess, I think they should.... ;-) (History notes: The first use of term "widget" that I heard was from Stardock, although the concept was familiar from Apple's Desktop Accessories... network access sort of changed the game, though... the best overview and news today probably comes from Niall Kennedy.)

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