Not to mention the fact that the RIAs I have seen don’t:

* Expose raw page content for search engines
* Expose URLs suitable for state-preserving bookmarking
* Allow arbitrary text on the page to be selected and then copied
* Allow (as Savio notes) page searching
* Integrate nicely with existing browser shortcut keys (e.g. why can’t I close a Firefox tab with Control-W from within Acrobat)
* Support the use of alternate style sheets for accessibility

These are all features and behaviors that we would almost certainly like to take as given when we use a web browser.

I’d much rather be able to use CTRL-F or / with Firefox to find what I’m looking for on a web page (or within text content on a web app) or CTRL-+ to increase text size or mouse gestures to navigate…etc than experience slick media stuff based on Flash.

Disgruntled Flash User

Sure I like text based systems, I worked on 3270 terminals for the first 12-years in IT, I grew-up reading books and only the occasional comic. But that doesn’t make me a communications expert with those who are growing up with youtube, flash et al.

There is an internal project at IBM called Bluebird that involves the Samsung T9, you can get your calendar, email et al read to you… its pretty neat. Then theres the ability to reply to email only by voice. Yes, I can think of a million reasons why this can be extremely annoying to the receiver, but its interesting in how it works when it works.

Not that I’m saying thats the answer, I’m just suggesting that text isn’t always or even the right way and there are a generation of people for whom visual doesn’t equal scroll bars and po(o)p-ups.

You make a find point. I’m personally interested in blogging. In relation to blogging, most blogs begin being about projecting the blogger’s content, whether it be written or another media.

What happens along the way, often, is that snippets and little scripts in thrown in here and there, which end up making the blog some sort of index for all the online services the blogger is using.

They key to make a useful application, rich or poor, is to make it appropriate. Scrapblog wouldn’t get far if it resembled Google Docs.

And I hate referencing Google (as I did in the quoted post), but they really understand that if the objectives of an application are a, b, and c, then there’s no need to throw in an additional app that does something else. And in comparison that isn’t applicable for Scrapblog.