AJAX Ho!

I was playing Zelda Classic this weekend when a realization struck me...

Perhaps it came to me because of all my recent fiddling around with the Google maps API, 37 Signals' Basecamp and Backpack, the Dojo Toolkit, and all other manner of Ajax goodness.

Perhaps I was just very bored and lulled into a strange state of super-consciousness by the endlessly looping Zelda theme.

Regardless, it occurred to me that there is no reason I couldn't play Zelda in a browser nowadays. PNGs would do a fine job of displaying sprites, and things like Google Maps have demonstrated that you could certainly scroll around a massive overworld map pretty smoothly, and JavaScript has really come of age lately with object-oriented-ness and all that jazz.

Ok, so the control scheme might be annoying, being that browsers so far don't seem to have very strong joystick / gamepad support.

I bet there are still lots of games you could play in browser though. In fact, ironically, a modern rogue-like would be pretty nifty and is certainly suited for a heavy-weight server, light-weight client arrangement -- sort of getting back to the roots of it all, really.

Perhaps with the addition of fully-functional SVG (we're not quite there yet) the wave of "Web 2.0" JavaScript-ness and Ajax-iousity will finally pound the first chinks into the armor of the mighty giant Flash...?

I guess we'll have to wait and see.