Silverlight

[VectraMan]

No, this is all about risk factor of betting farm on propriatory technology that can be pulled by that company for whatever reason or just gravely damaged like Microsoft just did - I guarantee you plenty of CTOs who heard that stuff would be reluctant to pay contractors do Silverlight.

On that basis nobody would ever write software for Windows, and that's not to mention the iPhone.

I agree, but the point I was making is that it's a shame that the "open" equivalent are so far behind. If it's a choice of do the project now with proprietary technology, or wait 10 years for the standards bodies and browser developers to get their acts together, then there isn't a choice.

[d000hg]

I'd actually started to look at it properly too with a view to porting one of my iPhone apps to Win Phone 7 so that announcement is very timely indeed. Be sticking to an HTML 5 version now.

Silverlight is still THE Windows Phone 7 dev tool, if you work in mobile apps it's still valid.

[d000hg]

Exactly, MS have a certain syndrome, where, when they see something successful they try and copy it (usually making a right arse of it).

Flash -> Silvertulipe
Java -> .NET
Iphone -> Kin\Windows Phone 7
Google -> Bing
Playstation -> XBox

Competing with existing products is how business works. Look at Google:
Flash -> Gears
Java -> Go
Symbian et al -> Android
iPhone -> Nexus1
Linux -> ChromeOS
Yahoo/Altavista/etc -> Google search

Everything Google does is copying existing ideas. And Flash competed with Java Applets years ago.

Really, try to avoid stupid "they're copying people" arguments. It's the quality and timing of your copies that's important. MS have been hit & miss but .NET, XBox are both hugely popular and have very wide usage.

Kindly name one big tech company that hasn't had cock-ups... Apple, Google, IBM surely all have.

[kandr]

Obviously by "HTML5" I'm included the whole package (CSS3, SVG, Canvas, video etc.), and although they may be quite different underneath they essentially are used for the same purpose. We're being told that HTML5 is the future for any kind of online graphical presentation, or training, or simple games, or "apps" if you insist on using that term, anything that goes beyond the mostly static text of the web, and the things that Flash or Silverlight (or Java applets if you're really desperate) might have been used for up to now.

So why can't we compare two things that can be used for the same purpose? Please explain. What do you think Flash is used for that makes it totally different?

HTML 5 is just the next version of HTML, yes it has some new tags for graphics and video, but its only a small part of it. Flash has filled a gap, albeit CPU killing and with a new security hole every week. Once youtube/iplayer moves to use the video tag which will play using hardware accelerated codecs rather than CPU killing flash, the web will start to reach its potential.

[VectraMan]

HTML 5 is just the next version of HTML, yes it has some new tags for graphics and video, but its only a small part of it. Flash has filled a gap, albeit CPU killing and with a new security hole every week. Once youtube/iplayer moves to use the video tag which will play using hardware accelerated codecs rather than CPU killing flash, the web will start to reach its potential.

You sound like one of those "uniformed" people that can't think beyond which is the better video player, and you're obviously "uniformed" about that too.

SVG is the closest thing to Flash, and that's been around for a while but seemingly unloved, unused and unsupported. But now it's part of the spec and supported by IE9, that'll probably change. And the Canvas object can also be used for similar things, although it's not quite so suited for animation. All those annoying Flash ads will convert quite neatly to either SVG or Canvas as part of HTML5, and look exactly the same.

So we have video, and we have ads, which covers 99% of the use of Flash on the web that can be done with HTML5 instead. So in what way are they totally different and can't be compared?

[d000hg]

What about games and other interactive RIAs? I'm not convinced HTML5 is a substitute even with the much faster JS we get these days, considering Flash is already moving into accelerated 3D type graphics.

[kandr]

You sound like one of those "uniformed" people that can't think beyond which is the better video player, and you're obviously "uniformed" about that too.

SVG is the closest thing to Flash, and that's been around for a while but seemingly unloved, unused and unsupported. But now it's part of the spec and supported by IE9, that'll probably change. And the Canvas object can also be used for similar things, although it's not quite so suited for animation. All those annoying Flash ads will convert quite neatly to either SVG or Canvas as part of HTML5, and look exactly the same.

So we have video, and we have ads, which covers 99% of the use of Flash on the web that can be done with HTML5 instead. So in what way are they totally different and can't be compared?

One is a proprietary plug-in the other is a Declarative Language Specification.

Like comparing apple quicktime plugin to XML

HTH

[NickFitz]

Here's a video of a nice demo using pure HTML5, WebGL (the soon-to-be-finalised 3D Canvas API) and JavaScript, running in Chrome on eight machines synchronising via a node.js server (that's a hyper-efficient asynchronous event-driven non-blocking HTTP server implementation running "clunky old JavaScript" on Google's V8 engine).

[AtW]

Silverlight is still THE Windows Phone 7 dev tool, if you work in mobile apps it's still valid.

WP7 got no effing chance in hell - making Silverlight being the "designed" tool for eff all device is as good as killing it, worse actually - if Microsoft just said - we stop making Silverlight it would at least make things easier, but now they'd introduced element of uncertainty ...

[d000hg]

WP7 got no effing chance in hell - making Silverlight being the "designed" tool for eff all device is as good as killing it

Not according to people I know who actually use SL, and the people who have used a WP7 phone. You have to use a special dev-platform for Android phones and a special dev-platform for iOS, and Blackberry, and Nokia... so what's the difference needing something specific for WM7 too.