Harry's Mum: If you haven't seen it yet, J. K. Rowling's site is worth a look-see. It's some fun flash stuff that's subtle rather than being chaotic and in-your-face, like so much of the flash stuff that's out there.

Web designers face tough challenges--challenges that, I think, will eventually shape the entire direction of the internet.

One observer pointed out, a few years back, that a lot of the internet was just a glorified brochure format. That still remains true--the internet is still, in large part, a bunch of blocks of text that references other blocks of text.

I remember thinking, when I was first learning HTML, that it would make for great choose-your-own-adventure-type stories.

We're moving past that, to a large degree, with flash animations that are actually interesting rather than annoying, and DSL making it possible to distribute more films that otherwise wouldn't get around (Have you seen Grayson or Batman: Dead End yet?), but we still haven't got to the point where the text and the interactivity have really hit their crescendo.

In fact, I think (maybe hope is a better word) that the true interactivity the internet has made possible, the real connectedness, hasn't even been concieved of yet. The fine authors of SciFidom have been giving us scenarios where the the internet becomes a vast, fully-realized world we all live in rather than facing our real lives since before there even was an internet. However, I think the real place the internet is taking us, a place where not just scenarios, but information, all the world's knowledge, is available from our own desktops, is a far more interesting one than any convoluted D&D rip-off virtual world could ever hope to be.

But until we get there, go see the pretty pictures on JKR's site.