Simon Morris's Blog: July 2007 Archive

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll.

It would seem my previous blog caused a few minor ripples in the blogoshpere. But it only scratched the surface of the issues surrounding Rich Internet Applications, where they could one day take us, possible routes getting us there, and what pitfalls could be lying in wait along the way.

The switch from solitary working on a your personal laptop to collaborative working across the internet may hold great promise, but such applications are still in their infancy. Success will demand navigating through some fundamental changes. While advocates focus on the changes within the software itself, they all but ignore the impact on the supporting environment: the operating systems, the file systems, the Explorer/Finder desktops, and even in underlying network architecture. And that's before we even take into account how it can all go wrong, or how publishers are expected to make money from their applications.

There's easily enough material for a book, let alone a single blog.

But before a single toe can be dipped into these murky waters, one ugly problem stands in the way. It was evident in some of the commentary sparked by my previous blog, and as you may have guessed from the quote which opened this text, it's a problem of terminology.

While my previous blog sought to attach some (satirical) labels to different RIA strategies, in this blog I want to peg down a couple of existing terms which have been flapping about like mad in the forums and the blogosphere.

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