Dave Hyatt (the guy behind Apple’s Safari browser) just posted a few more details on Apple’s new ‘Dashboard’ feature that they’re pushing as a part of Tiger:

I wanted to blog briefly to clear up what the widgets actually are written in. They are Web pages, plain and simple (with extra features thrown in for added measure). Apple’s own web site says “build your own widgets using the JavaScript language”, but that’s sort of misleading. The widgets are HTML+CSS+JS. They are not some JS-only thing.

That actually makes me feel a lot better–Apple has been widely accused of pilfering the design from Konfabulator, even though Apple had similar features in the old Mac OS from the very beginning.

If you look at Dashboard as a way to turn quick-and-dirty web apps into real desktop applications, it suddenly looks very different from a straight Konfabulator rip-off. In fact, it really looks more like an interesting attack on XAML and Avalon, two of Microsoft’s additions to Longhorn. The underlying technology is different, but the fundamental goals are almost the same–allow people to develop both web and desktop applications using the same tools. The implementation differences reflect the basic difference between Apple and Microsoft’s approaches–XAML/Avalon is a ground-up replacement for HTML and the traditional Windows programming model, while Dashboard is really just a small tweak to something that already exists.

Update: As usual, John Gruber says it better then I can.