“Rich Internet Applications” are Internet applications. They can use the WWW’s HTTP protocol, due to their general ability to use Internet protocols.

The Net is larger than the Web. Does that way of looking at things help at all…?

jd/adobe

(PS: Apollo helps bring WWW pages and applications to the desktop, with file-writing privileges, cross-domain privileges, and other abilities found in applications downloaded from trusted sources. Apollo’s novelty is that you can use your HTML and JavaScript expertise to build desktop applications — closer to XULRunner than Firefox. The nice thing about WWW browsers is that you can surf safely anywhere in the world. Apollo is more for when you trust a site enough to grant them additional functionality.)

That’s good. I want to use the best, most open components possible. The only problem I have is FF is not currently as widely available as Flash, and not nearly as capable per developer erg.

Also, the DOM is fine and general. Ok. But as someone whose done a lot of structured graphics via a display list, and sees *many* uses for such a thing, the DOM is not as good as the Flash/Flex display list. That goes for svg, canvas, etc.

I’d like to see FF move in the direction of providing a good display list capability for structured graphics, even if it is using the DOM, svg, etc.

I think your embrace/extend is a bit wrong. ActionScript 3 (flex) and Any-Coolio-Language (Silverlight) are too different from plain old JS for this to be considered extending. Apples and oranges.

I think it’s fair to say, to some extent, they are embracing and extending the browser. But they’re not embracing and extending the web.

Just to be clear, I think the ball is clearly in FF’s corner on this one, unless MS and Adobe open up their stories more. Adobe in the runtime side, Adobe and MS in the tooling side. But I welcome our new whacked out client overlords, in as much as they’ll be bringing some new ideas to the table. Remember when Python was going to be part of FF? What happened to that? Think anyone’s thinking of that again? What about Ruby in FF?

What are your thoughts on Slingshot? http://www.joyent.com/news/press-releases/2007/05/01/joyent-announces-slingshot-public-release/

Now, if you went in knowingly, and it works for you, then great, fantastic, couldn’t be happier for you. However, I think in the long run those applications that cross the line into proprietary won’t remain viable, because they’re not built on standards. I also remain cynical of the vendor’s motives.

I’m as upset about Flex and Silverlight as everyone else is about MS having a proprietary web server platform (ie, not at all). Where are the cries for “Why couldn’t have MS just contributed to Apache HTTPD?”

But, back to the client, where is the outrage over any client that uses the web that isn’t running in a browser? iTunes, for instance. Completely fails Mike’s test.

Client (browser) wars. Competition. Good for everyone. Monoculture bad. Frankly, FF had no competition till this stuff reared it’s head, technologically, and thus was on a path to IE-like stagnation. Competition is a good stagnation killer.

Look at the apollo site… it *includes* the standard browser components for visiting sites that service standard browser stuff.

What more can be said about that? Pretty clear.

1. Contributed this functionality straight to Mozilla
2. Embraced existing standards (e.g. *HTML?, SVG) or open source XML-based GUI frameworks (e.g. XUL) rather than create something unique.
3. Created new, real (not de facto) standards that anyone can implement.

And what’s this about competing with Mozilla, anyway? Adobe is competing with MS, and vice-versa. They are trying to convince developers that the wildly successful Web isn’t really good enough for “real” applications. What you need is this flashy runtime and these rich developer tools. It’s a land grab, and I don’t buy it.

Here’s an excerpt from Mike Shaver’s (the Mozilla Technology Strategist) post on the subject:

When the tool spits out some bundle of shining Deployment-Ready Code Artifact, do you get something that can be mashed up, styled, scripted, indexed by search engines, read aloud by screen readers, read by humans, customized with greasemonkey, reformatted for mobile devices, machine-translated, excerpted, transcluded, edited live with tools like Firebug? Or do you get a chunk of dead code with some scripted frills about the edges, frozen in time and space, until you need to update it later and have to figure out how to get the same tool setup you had before, and hope that the platform is still getting security and feature updates?

The long and the short of it is the Web works. Sure, Web technologies are also far from perfect. And I’d much rather see MS and Adobe working to improve this situation within the spirit of the Web; universal and open, rather than “competing” to own a piece of the Web with their narrow and proprietary toolkits.

But listen, if someone says that Apollo/Silverlight meets their needs (whatever they are), and they’re willing to develop towards a single runtime (maybe because the app is for internal deployment and they can control the corporate desktop), then, really, that’s fine. It’s just not for me, that’s all.

You mention “I sure wish Adobe and MS would try and float all boats and not just their own”. Think broader. The boats are being floated for new ways of thinking about clients, for increased use of RESTy data-oriented web usage, etc. Not to mention, again, the innovation these new technologies bring, that will light a fire under, say, moz-based browser developers / fan boys to compete. If these new coolio client technologies really start to take off, moz will have some serious competition. Competition good.

In retrospect, were the 1990’s browser wars good, or bad?