William T Goodall wrote: > And don't get me started on Silverlight :-) Aw, come on! Silverlight is actually amazingly useful and something that may actually make things better for developers in the long run! If it weren't for Silverlight then I really don't think that Adobe's recent "open source" efforts would have happened. You can't complain about a "windows monopoly" and not hate the decade-old "flash monopoly" on the web. Why should I pay Adobe to develop animated website content?
Moonlight is only a half-step behind Silverlight, and using the same coverage and test suites. Silverlight programming is much more like modern web programming than Flash. You can write entire Silverlight applications in your page's existing ECMAscript/AJAX in your web page editor of choice, by scripting against the Silverlight DOM. You can write your graphics/animations in a text/xml editor or convert it from Inkscape (Inkscape comes with a basic XAML export)... Can you do that with Flash? No, not yet. Will you be able to do it thanks the newly open sourced pieces from Adobe? Maybe, but it's probably not happening soon. Complain all you want about Silverlight not using "open standards like SVG" directly, but XAML is a good deal closer to SVG than Flash's binary files ever were. Honestly, I think this whole "embrace, extend, extinguish" paranoia is eating away brain cells from otherwise seemingly intelligent people. You can't have your cake and eat it too. You want Microsoft to compete "more fairly" in their existing business but then scream loudly when they attempt to move into new businesses and shake up the market by adding in some actual competition... You don't like Windows having 85% of the PC market share but you don't mind Flash having some 99.999% of the web animation market share? Not to mention that Silverlight does not "embrace" Flash. It's entirely separate, has somewhat different design goals, and in no way using existing Flash technology. So they can't "extend" Flash with Silverlight. That doesn't make any sense. It's very, very unlikely that Silverlight will entirely "extinguish" Flash or even Java Applets from use on the web. Why shouldn't developers have one more alternative to "rich media" on the web? -- --Max Battcher-- http://www.worldmaker.net/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
