Recently I sat in Redmond, WA at Microsoft headquarters for one of the councils I serve on and listened with absolute fascination to Brad Becker (Director of Product Management, Developer Platforms) and Brian Goldfarb (Director, Developer Platform Product Management team) honestly and candidly describe the challenges, opportunities, and confusion the HTML –Silverlight “thing” has created.
“In about half the time HTML 5 has been under design, we've created Silverlight and shipped four major versions of it,” said Brad. Brad was the product manager for Flash and Flex at Adobe before taking his role at Microsoft. He has a career and reputation rooted in rich client applications for the web.
The Reality
The reality is that, even though the major browser platforms already have HMTL 5 implementations in beta (including Microsoft’s IE9), the specification for HTML 5 is not even close to being completed/ratified. It could be years. Adoption could be years after that. So why all the hysteria? Is it just the technology industry that gets sucked into hysteria situations like this? That latter question is rhetorical, but the reason for the hysteria is that HTML 5 offers a bold promise of rich client applications for the web that are ubiquitous among browsers, platforms, and devices. And we are clearly in HTML 5 hysteria right now. Do a little Internet search on HTML 5. It is shocking. The other reality is that even when HTML achieves ubiquity, and it will; it still will not measure up to Silverlight. It won’t measure up to Silverlight 4 and God only knows (although there have been a lot of hints) at what version 5 of Silverlight will feature. For instance, arguably the biggest and most exciting feature of HTML 5 is the video tag: <video>. The video tag will allow the developer to simply embed video playback directly in the HTML. “The media features of Silverlight are far beyond what HTML 5 will provide and work consistently in users' current and future browsers,” said Brad Becker. What Silverlight does now and HTML 5 will not do is:
- High Definition (HD) H.264 and VC-1 video
- Content protection including DRM
- Stereoscopic 3D video
- Multicast
- Live broadcast support
- (Adaptive) Smooth Streaming
- Information overlays / Picture-in-picture
- Analytics support with the Silverlight Analytics Framework
And the video thing is just one use case. I could go on and on, with arguments rooted in developer productivity and data access and such, but the point here is you cannot compare HTML 5 to Silverlight. It is not fair to HTML 5 to do that. For that matter you cannot compare HTML 5 to Flash for many of the same reasons.