RIA

The Rich in RIA So far we have spent almost one half of this overview and have not even mentioned the Rich part of Rich Internet Applications. Rich stands for the broad set of media supported by RIA's - multiple fonts, vector and bitmap graphic files, animations, online conferencing, audio and video are typical of many RIAs. Rich buys eyeballs because it delivers content in the form most appropriate to the message. Some Internet tools like Flash can deliver this now with more or less flexibility. But there are a host of DHTML based web development tools that will ask what is all this RIA fuss ? But the simple fact of the matter is that DHTML is very HTML dependent. So critical font, vector graphics, and form component support are all very mixed- weak in the case of fonts, nearly non-existent in the case of vector graphics(no browser yet supports SVG), and long in tooth in the case of form components. Also DHTML is only as good as are the HTML/CSS/DOM/JavaScript standards. And unfortunately a notable player in Redmond has lagged way behind on supporting full standards in their Internet Explorer browser. And as of May 2003 that browser is not to be updated except for security fixes until Longhorn comes out in 2006/2007. The net result has been that Rich content oriented web tools like Adobe's Acrobat PDF, Macromedia's Flash SWF, and Viewpoint's Metastream MTS have garnered large web usage even before delivering a full RIA solution. But all of the above vendors and a host of others are busy completing their RIA solutions.