The Web Standards Project has posted an article on the future of ‘Rich Applications’, referring to Gmail, HoTMaiL and Yahoo!Mail.  They also take newly developed web-based applications as example and refer to Joel Spolsky’sHow Microsoft lost the API war“, an excellent article on the history and future of application development.
With new technologies like Mozilla’s XUL and Microsoft’s XAML future applications will be different, it’s still not yet clear what they will look like and how they will be developed.
 
Read the full article here: The Web As Platform