I have blogged about Silverlight and Flash. My position was that Silverlight will kill Flash. Now is the time to revisit how right I was. Well, I was wrong, at least for the time being. Silverlight failed to make a dent in Rich Internet Applications development. And that is not because of Flash. That is because of HTML5.
HTML5 brings a number of things that makes it a better choice for many. Here is my list of those things.
- CSS3 effects. RIA is all the more about eye candy as it is about functionality. CSS makes it possible. Round corners and transitions and gradients and transparency are key.
- Offline. No need having Gears. HTML5 is almost as capable of storing data client side as Flash or Silverlight. I wish there was standard for “structured data” aka SQL based storage, but blob is good enough for most needs. Storing JSON in blob is good enough.
- Javascript libraries. jQuery and other libraries have matured. A number of jQueyr plugins is mind blowing.
- <audio> and <video> tags. Right, there are incompatible between browsers in terms of formats. But there are good player libraries already that work around this issue, failing bakc to Flash for the older browsers.
- iPad and iPhone. iOS devices famously dis Flash, but Silverlight does not fair any better. iPad sells in millions but its importance on technological choices people make is well beyond what sales numbers suggest
On the other hand Silverlight got a new life in Windows Phone 7. I shall review this situation in the upcoming post
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Filed under: Blogroll, CSS, HTML5, Silverlight, web applications, webware
