That John Martin

What am I missing? So far I just don’t get why Silverlight is going to take over the web. Now, I’ve been hacking Python via TextMate on a Mac for the previous year, so I may not be in the target audience for this, but the four years previous to that were spent inside Visual Studio, both on the client via WinForms (using ClickOnce no less, or at least the predecessor of ClickOnce, whatever that was called) and on the web via ASP.NET; I’m no CLR hater, but I just don’t see what the excitement is for.

A commenter on Dare’s post, davidacoder, said exactly what I was thinking:

This is a new attack on a standard format like HTML in the browser. We have seen them before: Java, Flash, .Net full versions. None worked. This one is supposed to work because it is 1) small and runs on more than 2) one browser and on 3) the Mac and 4) is integrated with the MS dev stack.

Everything but 4) is present in Flash already. Has Flash replaced HTML? Do you really believe that integration with the rest of .Net and VS is going to win the battle? Most web guys I know don’t know .Net, they don’t have a skillset in that technology to be transfered to the web.

Good luck, I don’t believe those were the reasons previous attempts failed. People don’t want vendor lock in. Silverlight is super vendor lock in. It is not going to fly.

Granted, WPF/E + the CLR sounds like a better deal than Flash, but it’s a better deal for developers, not users. If there were a killer app for RIAs, then somebody would’ve written it in ActionScript years ago regardless of how shitty the development environment was. People have written Doom in JavaScript, for crying out loud. If there’s an opportunity there, hackers will make it work.

The one area where Flash has been world-dominatingly successful is the one where it’s least Flash-like: video. And I would suggest that the reason it was successful there was because a) the runtime was ubiquitous, and b) it was/felt “lighter” than the alternatives, neither of which are attributes of Silverlight.

Anyway, I reserve the right to be wrong. In the meantime, go and read Mr Pilgrim’s take.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 12:47 pm and is filed under javascript, windows.