What of RIAs?

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are the new old rage, reminded as I am of it by Adobe's launch of AIR. I'm with Tim Bray on this, though, in that I think RIA's are not that great.

The web comes with a lot of constraints, and that is a Good Thing, which leads to simpler designs by forcing designers to get to the heart of a problem. These simple pieces are also leading to composable applications (mashups and web service integration). I don't know if this is leading to nirvana, but it's certainly better than where we were before the Web.

So I agree with Tim that most of the richness claims are red herrings. However, and he doesn't seem to point this out yet, there is a compelling capability in being able to work offline using the same technology stack as the Web. Now, I don't believe Flash is the way to go here. Rather, some offline type of DHTML/AJAX that resyncs when connected would be pretty cool. However, this is a hard problem to solve--something I am currently struggling with at work (for a thick client app no less!), so I am also skeptical of claims that RIAs or AIR will help much in that space.