When Tim Berners-Lee first envisioned the Web he saw it primarily as an information storage and retrieval system. That is gradually being replaced by a much more complex model, where rich Internet apps are supplanting static HTML pages and old notions of what it means to browse the Web are being challenged. Is it really still the Web, Neil McAllister asks in today’s Fatal Exception blog, “if it’s not really hypertext? Is it still the Web if you can’t navigate directly to specific content? Is it still the Web if the content can’t be indexed and searched? Is it still the Web if you can only view the application on certain clients or devices? Is it still the Web if you can’t view source?“If today’s RIAs no longer resemble what we would call the Web,” McAllister writes,”then is shoehorning those applications into the Web’s infrastructure really the right way to go? If application developers feel limited by the constraints of standards-compliant browser technologies, should they really be targeting their applications for the browser? Or is the problem that the client platforms simply aren’t evolving fast enough to meet our needs?” Join the debate on these issues by telling us what you think. Software Development