Dang It

That blogger tool. It seems easy to accidently reject a comment, or something. Anyway, Christophe Grand commented...

While reading this post one hypothesis came to me: the angst created by rich internet applications environments isn't about rich internet applications, it's about web pages. Will rich internet applications IDEs lead the user who doesn't care about "the values of the web" to create a web site which isn't "on the web" (ie turning websites in something akin to badly designed flash sites)?

Sure they could. Web browsers did the same thing. I have encountered *many* web pages and entire sites that do not follow standards and so require one specific brand of browser (usually MSFT's Internet Explorer). We didn't need Flash to do that.

Actually if an average user picks Dreamweaver or Frontpage his websites will be on the web.

Where on the web will it be? Does the average user *know* this?

AJAX (beacuse of all its quirks) tends to favorize simple (as in KISS) solutions.

Even if I accepted this argument, would that be a *good* thing?

Will RIA environments do the same?

Well the one I am in love with so far does not seem to have as many quirks. Do you *want* your tools to be quirky in order to somehow steer you in some unintended-yet-better direction?

RIA environments appear to be good for RIA but will they be good for the whole web-things continuum (from dumb web pages to RIA)?

Apollo seems to be deliberately aimed in that direction. That won't (and probably shouldn't) prevent people from making other uses of it. But I think the message of "the web" is front and center in all that I have seen about it.