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MS To Push Silverlight Via Redesigned Microsoft.com
Marilyn M. writes "It looks like Microsoft is getting desperate about the dismal rates of Silverlight adoption by consumers and developers since its release earlier this year. According to NeoSmart Technologies, Microsoft is preparing a fully Silverlight-powered redesign of their website, doing away with most HTML pages entirely. With over 60 million unique users visiting Microsoft.com a month, Microsoft's last-ditch effort might be what it takes to breathe some life back into Silverlight. The article notes: 'At the moment, very few non-Microsoft-owned sites are using Silverlight at all; let alone for the entire UI.'"
If it doesn't work in Firefox, I'm not interested.
I will add, if it does not work with Firefox/Linux, not interested.
The nice thing about Silverlight is that it is a breeze to program and work with.
I think, once the initial knee-jerk anti-MS crud is past, people won't mind. Just like any web/presentation technology, it has it's pros and cons. But look, to work with Silverlight, to create Silverlight, you don't need an expensive suite of tools.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I remember when Netscape introduced frames, they changed the netscape.com website to use them. It lasted a few months, then they realised how silly they were and changed their website back.
Silverlight may be good for embedded applets and for applications, but it's ludicrous to use it for an entire website. I expect that Microsoft will shortly figure this out.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
It's not about them using it themselves.
It's about them leveraging an existing product to force the adoption of a new product.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
How to Google-proof your site in one easy step!
This site doesn't force me to use Flash.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
All trolling and MS-hating aside, Silverlight is not meant for the World Wide Web. Rather, it is, like many other Microsoft products (SharePoint, PerformancePoint, BizTalk, etc) for the corporate intranet. The corporate IT department can simply force the software onto everybody's computer, and the developers can easily develop a *real* UI without having to fumble around with trying to make HTML behave like Windows Forms.
http://www.mhall119.com
I think this is more of a case of farming out production of software to someone who actually knows the platform. Microsoft developing for Linux would be hilarious, better to let someone who knows what they are doing develop a compatible product.
I'll tell you how Silverlight is Not Great, and I've never used it in the slightest. And it's not because it's by Microsoft, or because it's not free.
/x?html/.
It's Not Great for the same reason Flash is Not Great: it almost always results in a worse user interface than using normal
For the developer the site is The Thing. It's important that the site has clean code, looks cool, and is easy to maintain. Maybe Silverlight makes that possible.
For the user the site is likely just one stop on a journey tied together by a web search. It's important that the site behaves similarly to all others in certain respects: that the browser's navigation facilities work, that the browser's text search works, that input behavior for these are the same as on all other pages (keeping in mind that key bindings, mouse bindings, context menus, etc. vary from browser to browser and user to user). Flash breaks this, and if Silverlight doesn't do the same I'll be shocked.
For the developer it's tempting to think the site is a book to be read from start to finish. But users are more likely to look in the index, tear out a few pages, and glue them into collages of their own creation. The developer can use the introductory chapters to lay out unusual notational conventions that will apply throughout the text but the user, not having read from the beginning, is only confused to see them used in the middle. If you're tempted to cry and bitch about this as a developer, get over yourself: users have more important things to do in life than figure out this super cool new interface to your web site.
A big part of the reason the web took off is that its limited facilities for UI design forced sites to mostly follow the same conventions. If you want to do something better, more complicated, something that people have to learn, then write a damn desktop app.
(Yes, there are useful and good things that can be done by embedding Flash/Java in web pages. Nifty videos and games, no-install VNC and ssh clients... as long as they stay self-contained and aren't part of the page's navigation or textual information presentation, knock yourself out).
In fact, Microsoft is only changing their download area to use Silverlight. In other words, surprise surprise - a kdawson article that is simply false. It's amazing, I know.
Agreed. Mono is a piece of crap on its own merits. I apologize if I gave any other impression.
Your argument of deliberate X11 incompatibilities is nice (though difficult to accept at face value), but ignores the fact that 90% of my rant centered around the craptactular development environment that is shipped as "Mono". It's decidedly developer-unfriendly, and using it on a Mac was not the cause of that.
On a system where Java is installed, things are easy to build and run. I can run "ant all" and everything magically compiles. I can look at the documentation and understand what every class and method does. If it runs on one system, I can expect it to run on the rest. Dependencies are clearly defined and easy to resolve. (And explicitly clear when tied to a given OS due to JNI dependencies.)
None of that describes Mono. Mono is a piece of crap that simply perpetuates a poor state of dependency hell, while wrapping your core software in a semi-portable bytecode that provides no real-world advantage in portability.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade