Standardised Widgets

Widgets/gadgets seems to be seeing a big rise in popularity. There are different engines available, OSX and Vista both have built in widget capability. A quick look at a wikipedia article on the subject shows that many of the different widget engines are capable of at least understanding xml, css and javascript.

Now, would it be too far fetched to say that widgets are actually comparable to web pages and that widget engines are much the same as browsers? Wouldn’t it be possible to standardize widgets to the same extent as html pages have been standardized to work cross platform/browser? You see, now when I want to use the tumblr widget I need to be running OSX. If I want to be able to utilize all the features use pownce I need to be running Adobe AIR.
If I am not mistaken the technologies found in both these widgets are probably the same. Adobe AIR and Dashboard would be able to understand the languages used to develop both these widgets.

What’s more, Yahoo! Widget Engine is only capable of XML and Javascript and that doesn’t seem to limit the possibilities of the widgets available for that engine, making it clear that if we would only standardize that, we would be able to run XML and Javascript widgets across all platforms and engines.

Interoperability is getting much more important than before and rightly so. I shouldn’t be locked into some proprietary format, whether it is for downloaded music or widgets.