Recent events have my mind spinning (pun semi intended,) so excuse the perspective-rather-than-directive here.

Ahem.

There's nothing stopping the web now. Not to say that there was doubt before, but man, there's nothing stopping it now. This is the fastest I've ever seen it move (granted, my observing eye awoke to a stagnant age where the blue E ruled all.) The momentum of the Web has become the momentum of the Software industry. It's really exciting from where I'm sitting.

RIAs are a nice gimmick. Flash was always annoying. Silverlight almost elicits rage (the tech is nice, but, urghh, why???) Now the days of every proprietary platform having it's own dedicated app store seem numbered. The web already has the largest catalog of applications of any platform today, and it's free and open for anyone to participate in.

Now to organize it.

An App Store for the Open Web ?

Search engines are great for finding things you already know you want, but there are tons of useful web applications out there that you'll never see because you never knew they were exactly what you needed. And it's a shame, because both parties are missing out: the creators and the consumers. The need for a better catalog is obvious.

Another interesting sub plot is the proposed Death of the URL. This would indeed lessen the freedom of the web, and its appeal to many. So, an app store for the open web that abstracts away the URL might not be so great...

But, well, URLs are still vastly useful on the modern web, right? People exchange them all the time over Twitter, Digg, Reddit, ect. There's already a tremendous amount of data about web apps based on the links that are traded. Let's build an app store with that in mind.

The way things are going, you are either with the web, or you are being deprecated by it. Choose wisely!

It's a platform, silly.

The debate over supporting RDFa within HTML5 has been burning hot. A quote from the editor of the HTML5 specification reveals what the friction is really about:

It's not clear to me that the future of the Web is structured data. If anything, I'd predict it was unstructured data. It would be useful to know why you think structured data is the future. - Ian Hickson

I've heard similar sentiments from others at Google. And it's true, Google is great at understanding unstructured data. But for the rest of us application and script writers, structured data is especially useful. Until the layman's tools for information gathering are on Google's level, any realization of a Semantic Web will depend on structured data.