DHTML

With DHTML, nothing is happening.  After years of browser wars, W3C's reenactment of the Little Engine That Could, and upgrade campaign that succeeded quietly and without any help from the developer community, finally nothing is happening.  DHTML has finally reached the state of mundane.

Only brightspot is DomAPI which continues to chug-along after 3.0 release.  Biggest feature of 3.5 is performance (supposedly 400% faster).

Flash

After arguably unsuccessful attempt to replace DHTML, Macromedia is now repositioning Flash as a rich client application platform.  Despite Flash's impressive graphics capabilities, odds are stacked against them.  An empire built by an army of artisans will certainly look pretty and interesting, but I wouldn't want to live in it.  They need to build better infrastructures that can support the weight of everyday living which I find more important than occasional "Wow!"

Lastly, a neat tool for Flash developers: flasm.  flasm is an assembler for Flash 'bytecodes'.  It also disassembles SWF files.  If you thought you enjoyed handrolling tight code, imagine the fun you'll have handrolling animation a bytecode at a time.  flasm has been around for a while, but I thought it deserved a bit more raving.