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Silverlight 5 Released
New submitter CaptSlaq sends word that Silverlight 5 has been released. Microsoft has not revealed whether it will be the last version.
"New features in Silverlight 5 include Hardware Decode of H.264 media, which provides a significant performance improvement with decoding of unprotected content using the GPU; Postscript Vector Printing to improve output quality and file size; and an improved graphics stack with 3D support that uses the XNA API on the Windows platform to gain low-level access to the GPU for drawing vertex shaders and low-level 3D primitives. In addition, Silverlight 5 extends the ‘Trusted Application’ model to the browser for the first time. These features, when enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate, mean users won’t need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks such as multiple window support, full trust support in browser including COM and file system access, in browser HTML hosting within Silverlight, and P/Invoke support for existing native code to be run directly from Silverlight."
It's not necessarily that plug-ins must die -- they push the web in new directions. It's that HTML should take the good ideas that plug-ins come up with and make them part of the standard.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The multi-ton elephant in the room is Netflix.
1) Plug-ins are a part of the HTML5 standard. The committee understands the two can co-exist and thrive.
2) The web has been thriving for many years now with plug-ins. I think it'll do just fine.
3) It was Flash that kept the progress of the web moving forward, when standards committee progress turned glacial. Go read about the history of Javascript. It's a sad tale, and that language is still 10 years behind Actionscript even though they are both based on the root ECMAScript language. Eventually Adobe had to go their own way with Actionscript because nothing was getting done.