After speaking at Saturday’s Multipack event and catching Bruce Lawson’s HTML 5 talk for the second time in a couple of weeks, I had some time to ponder on my walk home through the city.
By the time HTML 5 is prevalent across all major browsers, say maybe up to two years away (and I suspect still to be largely reliant on how long the fully HTML 5 supporting version of IE has been available), Silverlight should be up to version 5, going on 6 – by the current rate of progress.
The talks given by Bruce (of Opera, opinions his own :), and also Aza Raskin (of Mozilla) at FOWA point towards the future of HTML web applications and their integration with the browser. By adding more application oriented standards to the markup, and increasing the intelligence of the browser, they are becoming a more powerful tool in themselves, devolving some of the control from the applications within.
With Google’s approach to creating a web based operating system via Chrome – providing their suite of apps, new /old methods of communication via Wave and Gmail, and access to more content than you could shake a stick at… i can see why MS may find themselves playing catch-up here. Though I’m glad to hear that (at least for now) that MS are not going with Silverlight for their forthcoming Office 2010 web apps, from what I’ve seen of Outlook Web Access 2010 - if they can deliver a similarly well implemented UI, they may be onto a winner with the scale of their existing user base.
Via the AIR runtime, Adobe have stolen a march (cross platform at least) on Microsoft but it seems based on a slightly flawed technology (Flash/Flex) not designed for purpose from the outset. I’ve also just been shown the latest Apps on www.acrobat.com, and it looks like Adobe are having their own go, allowing you to create, share, collaborate and export as PDF documents via a Flash based word processor… though I’m not sure why you would want to.
What MS have in Silverlight is a very powerful, easily deployed platform with the potential for delivering really bloody complex, bespoke applications with advanced, custom, tailored user interfaces. And games, probably games too.
But you don’t really want to be experiencing this experience within the environment of a browser. With HTML 5 providing the capability of features like Canvas (shame video may be consigned to politics hell) and more consistent cross browser implementations of the scripting supporting it, Silverlight and Flash developers will have to work harder to to justify their use versus an increasingly sophisticated, plug-in free and fully open standards based, browser-native platform.
MS have taken the first step in unleashing Sliverlight in version 3, with Out Of Browser support. This enables you to run your Silverlight application from the desktop, off the internet, at your convenience. Except that right now, it isn’t as convenient as it could be, if it had some more of the features of its parent – WPF.
When Silverlight is able to step out of its sandbox and wear its own chrome, OS independent, it will be a true platform in it’s own right, without need or limitation of the browser. Sounds a bit prophetic, but I wonder if that may be its making or breaking.
3 Comments
On my walk home back from the Multipack event I had thoughts regarding the promotion of browsers and the restrictions that brings. With the implementation of databases in the browser and other HTML5 elements it will be tempting to put more and more of the server-side code onto the client. Are browsers going to live up to this? Bruce mentioned using of Basic style coding to run the canvas tag as it doesn’t hold a DOM. Isn’t this a step backwards? Javascript isn’t fully oop and we could end up with most of our code being open-source whether we like it or not.
Good to meet you on Saturday Jon, sounds like there was plenty of walking/pondering going on after the event!
I think you’re right - there’s a risk of business logic creeping into the client, but I’d hope by following some best practice guiding principles it will be avoided. Great technology can still provide a rubbish experience if implemented poorly.
As long as the distinction between Client-side and Server-side code remains clear (and i think there are simple ways of defining what should go where) we should be ok. With AJAX/HTML5 i think the distinction can be made with the development languages… though with Silverlight, the distinction comes via adhering to something like a MVC / MVVM framework in the application: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93controller
“Though I’m glad to hear that (at least for now) that MS are not going with Silverlight for their forthcoming Office 2010 web apps”
Not me. Silverlight is their new flagship product. To me, it would have been a real feather in their cap to dogfood this for their Office 2010 web apps.
What is the chance that we develop our Silverlight apps and we target different environments… ie. to be run as Html5 ?