As a language dork, I have certain itches that needs scratching. I’ve found that multiple incantations of the same words or phrases, after a while, cause me to scratch my head and take notice. This time, that word is “rich,” used in a developer context. Allow me to get all Andy Rooney on you, then:

• “Rich internet applications,” or RIAs for short, denote new multimedia-focused technologies delivered over the internet. These include Microsoft SilverLight, Adobe AIR, Flex, Flash, and the ever-vaprous JavaFX.
• “Rich user experience” denotes the sighs of gratitude coming from ordinary end-users as they blissfully navigate through said RIAs. Just Google this phrase and you’ll see this phrase sprinkled like parmesan cheese into lots of keynotes.
• The Rich Web Experience is a new developer conference focused on getting developers to… deliver rich user experences and develop Rich Internet Applications, but using web standards too. Speakers include my buddy Alex Russell (of Dojo Foundation fame) and Douglas Crockford (inventor of JSON, and one of the Yahoo! Paranoids)

So you might be asking, what’s with everybody’s fixation on “rich?” Positioning, positioning, positioning. Adobe and Microsoft would have you believe that web standards (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) deliver a relatively poverty-stricken experience (so to speak) compared  to what you can get if you, you know, use their spiffy developer tools. Which cost lots of money. Sun, not to be left behind, weakly warbles on about how they’ve got JavaFX and that it’s really great, and “rich” too. Meanwhile, CSS devotees are using free-as-in-beer tools like the FireFox 3 and WebKit-based browsers, and low-cost editing tools, to crank out astounding, interactive web applications. If you’ve seen what ACID3 calls for, for example, you know what I’m talking about. Modern web standards (particularly CSS3) can deliver experiences that are every bit as immersive, flashy and (cough) rich as vendor-based tools.

Cynics (like me) might suggest that what “rich” really denotes is the future state of certain software publishers, should developers adopt their tools en masse. But in reality, I think that “rich” is turning into a catch-all for applications that exhibit any of these qualities:

• Application programming and markup languages that aren’t JavaScript, CSS, HTML
• Downloadable runtime environments
• Interactivity
• Back-channel asynchronous communications (a la AJAX, JSON)
• Multimedia presentation

Some parts of this definition of “rich” make sense. AJAX and JSON, for example, have unquestionably reinvigorated the web as a platform in its own right. If you look job markets for developers, the hottest jobs are for AJAX developers. Postings for older languages like Visual Basic and C are a fraction of the number.

But the problem is that most of the time “rich” is used, it’s not obvious what the context is. Are we talking about 1) a Flash application, 2) something that runs under SilverLight, 3) an interactive website like Kayak that uses JavaScript and CSS in inventive ways, or 4) an exhortation to chain developers to yet another proprietary programming language? Because of the lack of clarity, I’ve concluded that “rich” is a lit like “synergy” — an empty word that means nothing in particular.

In the late 90s, it became fashionable for CEOs to inject the word “synergy” into conversations to justify corporate mergers. In reality, this just meant that the boss could not enumerate any particular benefits of the merger, and preferred to hand-wave and say “synergy” instead. ”Rich” is going the same way. Developers and vendors would do well to eliminate it from their vocabularies, and focus on specific properties of the things they are pitching.