Just heared about this today, but apparently W3C is working on a "standard" for the widgets:

[www.w3.org]

I read this really quickly but looked to me that this "standard" has nothing to do with Yahoo widgets. Anybody read it more thorougly or knows more about it?

Well, to me it looks like a hischool paper more than like a "widget standard draft". It's full of TODOs and TBDs, while the "proposed" sections are just parts of the Opera widget format. The Opera guys clearly made their intervention (as being part of the small consortium that wrote the document), as the proposed standard looks a lot more like an Opera widget than like any other existing widgets. To me it looks like it's a long way until getting a decent standard done.

And yes, the Yahoo widget format is very far from where this doc is going to. This is so funny, because I find the Yahoo widget format the clearest and simplest (arguably, least extensible) format on the market, at this time. While most platforms borrowed the cluttered information/presentation mashup from HTML and CSS, Yahoo (well, Konfabulator actually) came up with a fresh XML-based approach to define a widget. If Microsoft, Apple and Opera shake hands to standardize the HTML-based widget, because it's just too easy for them to reuse their HTML render engines, then what can I say, we'll just have another standard that designates the Start button to stop applications.

Interestingly enough, the document mentions a Widgets requirements document that the standard should address, which is much clearer and more decent than the draft supposed to derive from it. As if the guys that wrote the draft simply didn't get (or cared about) the most part of the requirements and just wrote what they knew better.