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Microsoft: Silverlight still has a future in an HTML 5 world

By | September 2, 2010, 11:06am PDT

Summary: Should Web developers target Internet Explorer 9 or Silverlight when creating new Web and mobile applications? One Microsoft exec takes a new stab at an answer.

At Microsoft’s Mix ‘10 conference in March, where Microsoft took the wraps off its HTML 5 vision for Internet Explorer 9, there were a lot of questions about the future for Silverlight.

Six months later — and one new version of Silverlight (version 4, released in April) later, those questions still persist. Should Web developers target Internet Explorer 9 or Silverlight when creating new Web and mobile applications?

Microsoft hasn’t issued any kind of white paper or definitive guidance. The official IE executive positioning has been HTML 5 is the future of the Web — but Silverlight’s not dead (yet). This week, however, the Silverlight team finally stepped up to the plate to defend the future of that platform.

Brad Becker, Director of Product Management, Developer Platforms, took the bull by the horns with a post entitled “The Future of Silverlight” on the Silverlight Team Blog. Becker repeated the party line that HTML 5 is nowhere near done and is a standard in flux. But he also made the case that Silverlight is the right solution for developers looking to create premium media content, as well as content/apps that can run on multiple platforms.

There is still confusion/overlap around business/enterprise apps and consumer apps. Should a Microsoft-centric developer target IE or Silverlight in those cases? Becker’s answer seems to be that it’s up to programmers and they should go with the platform to which they’re most comfortable coding.

I’m hoping Microsoft is prepping some kind of more definitive guidance for developers as to when to target Silverlight vs. when to target IE/HTML 5. (Given how often I’m asked by developers what Microsoft’s stance is here, I bet a white paper or cheat sheet would be welcome.) Maybe once the Softies are ready to talk about Silverlight 5 Microsoft will have figured out its own positioning and politics…

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Topics

HTML, Microsoft Silverlight, HTML 5, Microsoft Corp., Official IE Executive Positioning, Web Browsers, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

Mary Jo has covered the tech industry for more than 25 years for a variety of publications and Web sites, and is a frequent guest on radio, TV and podcasts, speaking about all things Microsoft-related. She is the author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft plans to stay relevant in the post-Gates era (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).

Disclosure

Mary-Jo Foley

Freelance journalist/blogger Mary Jo Foley has nothing to disclose. WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). I do not own Microsoft stock or stock in any of its partners or competitors. I have no business ventures that are sponsored by/funded by Microsoft or any of its partners or competitors.

Biography

Mary-Jo Foley

Mary Jo Foley has covered the tech industry for 25 years for a variety of publications, including ZDNet, eWeek and Baseline. She has kept close tabs on Microsoft strategy, products and technologies for the past 10 years. In the late 1990s, she penned the award-winning "At The Evil Empire" column for ZDNet, and more recently the Microsoft Watch blog for Ziff Davis.

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Talkback Most Recent of 32 Talkback(s)

  • If you just want to play unprotected video content HTML5 is ok
    If you want anything even slightly more sophisticated like multicast, drm, smoothstreaming, a nice high performance client experience, etc. then Silverlight is the best solution for the web today. flash just cant compete anymore...
    ZDNet Gravatar
    Johnny Vegas
    2nd Sep 2010
  • Just watch that 'HTML5 as a platform' nonsense flops
    @Johnny Vegas

    Any time I hear someone mentioning H5 as platform, I know the guy must have too little serious Web App development experience to understand H5/Javascript as a presentation layer only (and pretty inadequate at it) doesn't fit in a 3-tier environment.

    SilverLight + .Net is the best combo there is to build future Web Apps. H5 is a light year behind no matter how much hype they throw around.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    LBiege
    2nd Sep 2010
  • RE: Microsoft: Silverlight still has a future in an HTML 5 world
    @LBiege

    My requirements are for sophisticated interaction, sequential display of text and graphics and synchronised audio and video as my company develops eLearning.

    The only methods we had previously to reproduce the Windows desktop eLearning on the Web was through Flash or Java. As browsers improved, we developed an eLearning player using HTML/XML and Javascript with the help of various media players such as Flash and Windows Media Player. Javascript libraries such as EXT-JS, allowed us to add special effects and graphic primitives.

    However, we are still stuck with selecting a format for media. If I use WMP for audio and video, it will work on IE as well as FF, Chrome etc as well as Safari on the Mac - if they have the appropriate plug-ins. If I go with Flash for audio/video then it won't work on the iToys. If we choose H264 video and mp3 audio, it will work if the user has Flash or a working HTML 5 implementation or if WMP has the appropriate codec downloaded. Naturally we have to do detection and conditional code.

    HTML 5 does seem to offer what we need (although we will also have to support all the older browsers) but Apple's current implementation doesn't want you to have control of the .load and .play for the video and audio tags, which makes it hard to synchronise audio and sequential text display. Yes, there is a way around it, but knowing Apple they'll keep trying.

    However, this is all at the presentation layer At the moment, I'd go with Silverlight and .Net for web application development.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    tonymcs@...
    2nd Sep 2010
  • RE: Microsoft: Silverlight still has a future in an HTML 5 world
    @LBiege i completely agree. Adobe has had 99.9% market penetration for years now and just got complacent. Silverlight has a very real chance of completely replacing Flash, unlike HTML5.

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    atrok
    27th Jul
  • RE: Microsoft: Silverlight still has a future in an HTML 5 world
    @Johnny Vegas

    i completely agree. Adobe has had 99.9% market penetration for years now and just got complacent. Silverlight has a very real chance of completely replacing Flash, unlike HTML5.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    truthiness79
    3rd Sep 2010
  • RE: Microsoft: Silverlight still has a future in an HTML 5 world
    @truthiness79
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    exibir
    6th Aug
  • MJ had over reacted on her talk with bob muglia on her last post on SL
    @Johnny Vegas

    Leave it, I feel MJ had clearly over reacted on her conversation with bob muglia from Microsoft on PDC, her news had gone viral on SL all over web in the last 2-3 days.

    MJ - I feel, you shoud've been a responsible person in writing such topic, based on just a one-one conversation.

    The SL Team blog you've referred was posted on Sep 2nd, didnt' you know that already before spiraling the viral news few days back.
    ZDNet Gravatar
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    1st Nov 2010
  • RE: Microsoft: Silverlight still has a future in an HTML 5 world
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    concone
    24th Sep
  • WPF & ASP.NET could both potentially output HTML5...
    That means Silverlight's objective would stand as a lightweight UI framework for MS specific mobile devices. I am sure with a little evolution, WPF could be 'partitioned' to effect the same (a lightweight mobile component 'switchable' with a heavyweight desktop component) thus making Silverlight obsolete, I mean 'converged'.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    rmac_z
    2nd Sep 2010
  • WPF & ASP.NET could both potentially output HTML5...
    @rmac_z,
    Or it might be the other way around. Silverlight might make WPF obsolete....
    ZDNet Gravatar
    bmonsterman
    3rd Sep 2010
  • Why?
    I don't think there is a good understanding of the siuation. To be clear, Silverlight is not just for a media player. SL is a platform that you can write any kind of applications on. As matter of fact, 99% of what people are doing with SL is not playing video.

    I don't see where is the argument?
    ZDNet Gravatar
    jk_10
    2nd Sep 2010
  • RE: Microsoft: Silverlight still has a future in an HTML 5 world
    @jk_10 Agreed. Everybody seems to think the discussion is about "video" when it's really about RIA and applications that HTML5 really can't compete with both public on the internet and in enterprises.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    cmoya
    1st Nov 2010
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