Microsoft recently released the specification for XAML, an XML-to-object mapping technology that is most closely identified with WPF. They also released a specification for a XAML vocabularly as applied to WPF, Microsoft’s .NET-based user interface technology introduced with .NET 3.0 which serves as the baseline for Silverlight (Silverlight is a subset of WPF).
Some claim that this is Microsoft’s attempt to displace HTML as a standard for the Internet, even going so far as make complaints to the EC about it. For a company aiming to displace HTML, Microsoft certainly provides a lot of support for the technology (ASP.NET, an AJAX library in the form of ATLAS, lots of HTML authoring tools, etc.). WPF, however, was clearly designed to make desktop development more attractive by applying the lessons of web site creation to desktop development (markup languages are great for UI layout). Further, they wanted to make desktop applications more network-aware, a detail that makes possible things like Silverlight, to be sure, but also enables users to run full WPF applications in a web browser (think: applications you can access over the web, but then drop onto your desktop for use while offline).
Does that make desktop application development more competitive with web development (and, hopefully, boost the success of the pure-browser variant of that technology, Silverlight)? Clearly, Microsoft hopes it does. That, however, isn’t such a bad thing.