Get a load of this: earlier this month, the Royal Canadian Mint introduced a gold coin with a face value of C$1 million. It’s 99.999% pure gold and weighs 100 kilograms, or 45 pounds 220 pounds.

There are a few players I didn’t mention in my previous post on Rich Internet Applications. Laszlo has its own framework for building Flash-based apps, and they have plans to make their framework target Ajax as well.

Which brings me to the one platform I think has the best chance of winning: the web itself. HTML and JavaScript-based applications may be a pain to write, but it’s slowly getting easier, as evidenced by the dozens of Ajax libraries that have sprung up over the past two years.

I see the rise of the web as an application platform similar to the rise of the PC. At first, the PC was absolutely pathetic compared to its more powerful cousins: RAM measured in kilobytes, cassette drives for storage, operating systems that didn’t support subdirectories. But slowly and erratically the PC improved over time, until it ate companies like Digital for lunch.

The same is going on with the web. At first, HTML was pretty impoverished compared to desktop operating systems. No persistent storage, no drag-and-drop… I remember when web pages all had gray backgrounds and when you couldn’t even fill out forms. But all of these capabilities have slowly been added, and now web applications are vastly more capable than they were five years ago.

Isn’t Ajax kinda ugly? Sure! So are the x86 architecture and the Win32 API, but those aren’t going away anytime soon. Neither is the web.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t keep evolving. There are two efforts that could greatly improve the current state of affairs: HTML 5 and JavaScript 2. HTML 5 adds features like offline data, while JavaScript 2 includes some badly needed features such as a consistent packaging mechanism and class-based OOP (which may or may not be a good idea). Whether they are successful depends largely on whether Microsoft bothers to implement them well in Internet Explorer, and Microsoft is participating in both projects, so there is some hope.

So I believe HTML and JavaScript will continue to dominate over any other RIA platform. Microsoft’s actions with Internet Explorer will help determine how smoothly we get to that future.

My blog is under renovation! I’m finally starting to make my blog look more like the rest of my web site, by mucking with WordPress themes. Since I don’t feel like installing WordPress on my own machine, all of my experimentation will happen on my blog live. Hopefully it won’t cause much of a problem.

On Thursday night I saw a documentary on the History Channel on Bolivia’s Yungas Road, also known as the “Road of Death.” It’s a major transportation route running northeast from the capital city of La Paz, but the most dangerous section is gravel, only ten feet wide, with steep dropoffs of over 1000 feet and no guardrails, and grades up to 14%, twice as steep as the maximum grade for interstate highways. Over 200 travelers die every year on this road. It’s completely insane. The photos must be seen to be believed.

I actually don’t mind having these songs stuck in my head, which is a good thing.

Last month it was “Rhiannon” (video 1, video 2) and “Gypsy” (video 1, video 2) by Fleetwood Mac. Triggered by listening to The Dance CD over and over again during my trip to Rochester.

Afterwards came “Sister Golden Hair” (video 1, video 2) and “You Can Do Magic” by America. Probably triggered by watching an infomercial for The Midnight Special.

Now it’s “World (That’s the Price of Love)” (video 1, video 2) and “Ruined in a Day” by New Order. Don’t know what caused me to think of those, but those songs are classic.

What other typeface has both a book and a movie about it?

Helvetica at 50 by BBC News Magazine

Over the past month, there have been a slew of announcements that have the potential to rearrange the Internet development landscape. Building on the momentum of Flash and Flex, Adobe announces Apollo, a platform for building desktop applications using a combination of Acrobat, Flash, HTML, and JavaScript. This could be seen as direct competition to Windows, especially Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) apps.

Then Microsoft turns the tables and announces Silverlight, a spinoff of WPF which is a platform for building rich applications for the Internet and the desktop, on Windows and Mac. Version 1.1 will include a subset of .NET, allowing developers to create apps in .NET languages such as C# and IronPython.

And then today, Sun announced JavaFX, another attempt to make Java appealing to desktops and devices. So far it consists of two parts. JavaFX Script is a new scripting language that makes it much easier to build Swing apps; it’s been open sourced. (By the way, JavaFX Script has nothing to do with JavaScript, which itself has nothing to do with Java. Blech.)

JavaFX Mobile promises to finally make Java consistent and useful on mobile devices. From everything I’ve heard, the current Java solution for phones and PDAs, Java ME + CLDC, is next to useless without proprietary extensions.

While JavaFX sounds good, I don’t know yet if Sun is tackling the main problem with deploying Java apps: a 13 MB download for the JVM, as opposed to a 1.4 MB download for Silverlight or 1.2 MB download for Flash.

Who will win? Who knows! This promises to be an interesting ride.

May 8, 1886: Pain relief or the pause that refreshes? A pharmacist in Atlanta invents Coca-Cola. (Thanks, Rich!)