Well, a little exaggeration never hurts. Silverlight is a fine piece of software, but the marketing and the perception of Silverlight is really wrong. Microsoft claims it’s the new black and the chorus of MS MVPs and fanboys goes “yeah, baby lets use it for everything”.
I think Silverlight is fantastic at handling multimedia – high def videos and fancy animations. It’s like the new Macromedia Director meant in a very positive way. It’s not the new HTML (as in html+js+rest). Just like Abobe AIR isn’t. But I see more and more people thinking of it as the new HTML – maybe because they never really understood HTML. Maybe because they never spend R&D hours on what’s possible with HTML and JS. Or maybe because there’s just too many drag’n’drop cowboys in the Microsoft world, that are excited about being able to finally do animations in a webbrowser because a new Developer IDE lets them. Yikes!
HTML has come really far and with HTML v5 it’s close as everything we wanted for creating reliable webapps that can replace the desktop. And HTML is a standard. An open standard. Silverlight is a proprietary tool from a company whose desperate at getting back control over the web. Something they lost years back when they dumped the IE team after making IE 6. Microsoft still got the biggest market share in OS and in browsers, but they’re not controlling the browser space anymore. They’re forced to keep improving the browser due to the pressure partly from other browser vendors, but more importantly the increasing numbers of web based apps that are making the OS less and less important (Vista adoption rate, anyone?).
The fact that we’re getting closer and closer to a software market space (the web) where there’s no gatekeeper is incredible and makes it possible for small companies and open source projects to innovate and make a big impact without worrying about keeping “the mom happy”.
Open standards like HTML are the foundation making this paradigm shift possible. They’re not controlled by a single company that needs to keep their shareholders happy. They’re controlled by an independent organization who wants to give us the best possible tools for creating cross-browser, cross-platform and cross-device applications. This is why it’s crucially important that we do our best to support HTML. And this is why I like and dislike tools like Silverlight and Adobe AIR. We really don’t need them. And if the amounts of resources spend on Silverlight instead was spend on improving the tools for creating standard based web apps and making a complete implementation of HTML5 and CSS3 in IE8, we would have come really far.
So use Silverlight for multimedia, but don’t drink the Kool Aid. It would make the web sick.