Microsoft: Silverlight safe against HTML5

Does it matter?

Does anyone use Silverlight? ITV used to use it, but they switched to Flash.

"The IE team wants to fork the HTML5 spec by bolting on custom Windows APIs."

So there'll be an HTML-5-For-Windows browser and and HTML-5-For-Windows world wide web that non-Windows PCs can't render.

...Which has been Microsoft's Internet play all along - create proprietary technology that isn't quite standard, and infest the web with it.

It's the reason why they weren't able to use the name "Java". Remember Java? (It's still here!)

WebGl

I've been waiting since Silverlight 1.0 for a TileBrush that works. There is no working 3d engine with texture mapping for Silverlight. Flash has PaperVision and Away3d, but they don't have hardware acceleration.

I'm currently getting 50fps 3d rendering in WebGl / HTML5. The new Javascript JIT compilers are fast enough for audio processing.

It is never a good idea to question Microsoft's dominance in the corporate world, but I just don't know if they have the resources anymore to keep up development of Silverlight and a competitive browser. It is looking like Microsoft vs Everyone else, and with the new FireFox beta, Microsoft has a long way to go.

That said Javascript is a complete POS, and the proposed ECMA script changes would have helped, but it is sad to see they are DOA. Seems like Silverlight's biggest advantage right now. I wonder if anyone can put a Mono port directly in FireFox as an alternative to Javascript?

To little attention to the the doom of html5 within this very article

"Also, the IE team sees HTML5 as the replacement for WPF and wants to fork the HTML5 spec by bolting on custom Windows APIs."

And this is exactly what will probably kill off HTML5 before it even really gets out the gate, MS start forking it, then someone else will as well, then suddenly unless you are very careful your app is no longer platform independent, hell probably won’t even be browser independent. Bloody CCS/JS nightmare all over again

Honestly, HTML5 is more of a threat to Flash than Silverlight/WPF.

Majority of usage for flash is for video players and other minor stuff (excluding games), as they will probably agree a standard for most of that type of stuff in HTML 5 can see usage for flash going way down, Silverlight already lost in that arena long ago (to flash funny enough) but is it (and WPF) are going strong and getting stronger by the day within company’s for internal data driven business applications, something flash does not do well and not seen done well in HTML5 yet

Silverlight is not closed

As the Moonlight team will happily attest.

In fact, technologies which are driven/controlled by a small product team tend to progress much faster than designed-by-committee "open-standards" technologies like HTML5. Just look at the farce that has been Javascript development over the last few years, and the complete failure of those involved to produce a 2.0 of the language. When JS 1.5 appeared, the next version was supposed to be 2.0, with a class keyword and proper support for object-oriented programming. Instead, five years later, we got 1.6, where very little of any note happened to that language. In the same time-frame, Microsoft launched C# and .NET, /and/ produced a 2.0 release with generic support.

Even now, all the excitement over HTML 5 has come years ahead of an actual, final, concrete specification for the standard; once again the browser manufacturers are bickering over the details and implementing custom extensions.

There's a lot to like about HTML 5 and CSS 3, and I'm using some of the safer elements of both in projects, but there's a long way to go before I can quickly produce stable, cross-platform, cross-browser software the way I can using Silverlight/Moonlight.

I hope Silverlight dies

Although I do use it a lot, Sky Player is silverlight based, and very nice it is too.

Sky allow you to use Sky Player on four Silverlight enabled PCs, and one Xbox, although you will find your computer regularly changing it's DRM id, hence causing it to be re-registered, leaving the old one as a phantom - I've had to call customer services 5 times in one year to have these phantom computers erased.

The other thing this balkanization allows is that there is no Silverlight for android or iOS. I'm not sure if there is a solution for android, but for iOS, Sky get to bilk me for an extra £6/month/device - which only gets you sky sports anyways...

Sure would be nice to use some sort of standardized approach to this that allows me to choose the device and for them to provide the service.

@AC

HTML5 is not in the slightest bit 'vapour-standard'. You can read the proposed specs at WHATG and W3, and you can use the initial implementations in Chrome, Safari and Firefox. I can list a number of websites that already use HTML 5 video tags rather than flash players.

If your target audience is mobile users, then HTML 5 is already in use.

WPF>>Silverlight

It seems Microsoft's rapid-application-development (RAD) for touch based user-interfaces is 'buried' in WPF.

Silverlight is such a subset of WPF that the touch RAD features are missing, not giving you a framework much better than HTML.

Hubble Bubble

"more than 200 engineers working on Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)."

I forget, what's that saying about the quality of broth being inversely proportional to the number of cooks involved?

The biggest threat is the iPad

There, that stirred the poo for y'all. I've noticed a lot of free apps for accessing content (Rotten Tomatoes, FaceBroke etc) promoted for those with iPads. Sliverlight, Flash, IOS ...Android? Its a shift away from boggo standard HTML and toward apps that just suck on the TCP/IP pipes, bypassing web standards...