Capping IT Off

@Rick Mans
iPhone in fact proves that end users prefer fat, rich & desktop like user experience to the thin & dull provided by a free handset coming with every cell phone plan. You can check their latest iPhone SDK which is loaded with support to build NATIVE cocoa apps. In case you miss it, let me stress it's NATIVE. If the trend is to get thin then why they bring the fat, heavy native platform dependent SDK into iPhones? The answer is obvious: javascript is not up to it. Even Linux, Ubuntu for example, is trying to catch up with Windows and OS/X in terms of rich user experience. With hardware becoming better and more affordable every passing month, the trend is definitely toward the richer end not the thinner one. You are suppose to make use of the better hardware instead of ignoring them.
As for lock-in, gee, who cares other than religious developers? iPhone is a big lock-in, but does that hurt its popularity? The end users don't care as long as it works.
And really what's the difference between locked-in by M$ and by Mozilla? They both have an agenda behind it, which is to stay dominant on the internet. Mozilla, back then Netscape, invented this lame Javascript and then pretty much didn't do anything to improve it for a decade until they smelt what Adobe and M$ were cooking with Flash and SilverLight. They want Google to insert AdSense in a web page and bankroll Mozilla with a share of that massive revenue, so they prefer a thin and text-based format under their control despite users clearly want richer and more interactive content. I don't think they are more trustworthy than M$.
If Javascript wants to stay competitive, it has to get as rich as SilverLight, Flash and JavaFX. I mean let's face it: the CPUs are heading toward multicore and yet Javascript still requires work-around just to run multi-thread? Come on, that ain't gonna cut it. End users want great UX, that's the key. Whoever meets that need is going to win the market. If Javascript doesn't address that, users simply switch to those who do.

Hi Rick,
You got some good questions and comments. I know Microsoft have done some ugly things when it comes to standards. But they are getting better. They’ve done a good job in the web service space, working together with other vendors defining the WS-* specifications. They have also gotten involved with the OpenAJAX alliance, as well as the ODF committee. The announcement of full support for ODF in Office 2007 SP1 shows that they are listening to customer demand, and understand that customers’ demands open standards. So things are getting better… I guess the “good things” with plug-ins is that it enables innovation without crippling standards, like you say perhaps as a temporary fix until JavaScript and other open standards catch up. Google Gears is another example of a browser plug-in providing a “fix” of offline storage while we wait for all the browsers/users to upgrade and get the offline support that is part of HTML5.
Online media (audio/video) is another example where we have to rely on plug-ins today. Even though HTML5 specify a video-element it does not say which codec to support. FireFox have made announcements that they will support OGG as the codec in FF3.1, but it will take time before Microsoft and Apple catch up. Will Apple be willing to support OGG, or will they try to enforce their QuickTime format? And I doubt Microsoft will be willing to give up WMV investments, and will probably support the video-tag through some Silverlight/WMV integration… All in all, innovation through standards takes time and moves slowly. At least Silverlight 1.0 with its 1MB install gives you an easy option to get cross-browser, cross-platform (Mac and Windows) HD video support in the browser...
With progressive enhancement I guess it depends on what you are using Flash/Silverlight for. If it’s a small “part” of the application/site, like a music/video player, it’s fairly simple. In those cases I just see Silverlight as another level of enhancement, above JavaScript. So I start with standard based XHTML markup, add CSS, add JavaScript, and if possible, add Silverlight. One example is a web site I’m building with my girl friend (who is a web designer) for a music artist. If Silverlight is enabled, the header on the discography page changes to an interactive, iPhone/iTunes like music player. With some nice 3D like effects, flipping covers, track lists, audio player, lyrics scrolling in sync with music etc. I guess I could have achieved some of the same things using a JavaScript library, but it was darn easy to do using visual design tools like Expression Blend (which speaks XAML, the XML mark-up used by Silverlight). If the user doesn’t have Silverlight installed they can still look at the covers, track lists and lyrics, and download the albums. But it’s not as “premium experience” as if they use Silverlight.
As for search ability Silverlight faces the same challenges as Flash applications (and to some extend AJAX applications). When it comes to search I think it’s a big difference between applications and pages, and Flash and Silverlight are often used to build applications and not present content (for that HTML is a better fit). But, you would still like to be able to find your Silverlight assets using search engines. It’s absolutely possible for the search engines to index Silverlight content. Silverlight 1 exposes the XAML files as plain text files, while Silverlight 2 uses compiled code and zipped XAP files. That being said, the search engines could still download the XAP files and look inside them. Another solution is to have “invisible”/HTML content alongside your Silverlight pages. This would fit nicely with progressive enhancement since you’re exposing the pure content of the app as standard HTML, but the user is actually interacting with it through Silverlight. The search engines could pick up this content when crawling the pages, but when people click the search result they get the Silverlight app.
Another, and perhaps the easiest way, would be to provide good site map files with URL end-points to your Silverlight application states. This is the “old” problem of bookmarkenabled, back/forward navigatable AJAX applications. Silverlight and Flash faces the same challenges, but using JavaScript and browser integration it is possible to create Silverlight applications that interact with the browser and updates the URL’s so that users can bookmark “states” in the application (even though they never navigated to a new HTML page). These “end points” in your application could be listed in a site map file that the search engines could index to understand the structure of the RIA.
There are already several examples out there on how to build searchable Silverlight applications that integrate nicely with the browsers navigation scheme.
Cheers,
Jonas

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