What's stopping it, I imagine, is that it is a difficult task to come up with such a thing, and it is far more likely for someone driven by selfish interests to focus on the problem, devote the resources, and come up with a solution. Unfortunately, this ends up with a proprietary solution that is a non-starter for the community at large.

I mean, jeez, how successful has the community been at creating (and following) a simple standard for displaying and navigating documents? Sure MS has been the real problem child here, but the point still stands- you STILL cannot fire up a browser and expect it to behave in a consistent way when it comes to interpreting HTML, a far simpler task than running an application.

Now with XAML you have a really powerful language, designed from the ground up to write applications. You have out of the box support for MVVM, clean separation of your view and data/BL, flexibility, power, and all manner of other great things. The problem is, the only interpreter for it is something controlled by MS. And say they released it into the wild and said "have at it- it's completely open- we just want to make money off of our tools" no one would go for it because they don't want to be tied to something born from MS. And of course this is a legitimate response.

It just sucks, imo, that the situation is the way that it is, and I have no idea how to fix it. I truly believe we need a clean break from HTML for running apps on the web, and now I see that the solution cannot be proprietary. I believe it will be decades before anything like the web browser, but designed from the ground up for apps, is available as an open standard, and it's a sorry state because the technology exists RIGHT NOW but we cannot use it. I just get frustrated when politics get in the way of progress, however necessary it may be.

And please note- I don't really include the plug in itself as the technology that exists "right now". In a perfect world you'd have something like XAML, but as an open standard, and many different interpreters (analogous to IE, Safari, FireFox, etc.) that would run it, thereby not tying ourselves to a less than perfect solution controlled by a single company.