

If Silverlight were installed just as often as Flash, would you use it over Flash? - amichail

If not, why?
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babyshake
Do not want Silverlight.

Want javascript.

By the way, why don't you have a blog? You post some interesting stuff to your
twitter sometimes, but it would take a few hours at most to set up a Wordpress
site.

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amichail
I have little patience for writing long blog posts. And I suspect most people
have little patience for reading them.

In a way, twitter is a great equalizer, rewarding ideas over writing ability.

~~~
markbao
How about Posterous then?

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thorax
It'd be a toss up, but I've been surprised by Silverlight. The recent
implementation of Netflix streaming has been working without a hitch for me on
Mac, and I like some of the concepts they've worked into Silverlight-- most
notably the dynamic language support for things like IronPython.

The idea that I can code Python clientside, even .NET-ly, makes me happier. I
haven't done much yet there, but it does raise my curiosity to avoid hacking
around with Flex/ActionScript.

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halo
I think people probably would.

But I am of the opinion that Flash is slowly but surely dying in favour of
JavaScript and related technologies. Flash still has its niche for streaming
audio and video and a few other things that would be otherwise be a pain to
write, but they don't really justify the existence of Silverlight which has
largely marketed itself as "a better Flash".

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Kaizyn
This isn't entirely correct. If you're just talking about enhancing a web
page, then ok sure Javascript is more widely used. However, if you're talking
about building Rich Internet Applications, Flex is many lightyears ahead of
what JavaScript has to offer.

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river_styx
How so? I mean, what can you accomplish with Flex that you can't also
accomplish with modern javascript frameworks?

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swaroop
Try out some of the example applications at <http://degrafa.org/samples/> and
try to guess how long it would take you to write those samples using modern
javascript frameworks vs how long it would take to write using Flex/Flash.

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halo
Sure. But comparatively few of those samples represent things that you would
actually want to use in the real world, while there is a lot of overly shiny
eye-candy, poor user interfaces and non-native widgets - things that Flash has
always been notorious for.

Flash has always served a niche for what HTML and JavaScript can't easily do;
the problem is that over time this is diminishing, and it's looking like over
the long term Canvas and SVG will be one more nail in the coffin.

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cpr
I'd use neither. Both go against the open nature of the web.

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The_Sponge
It used to be a nightmare for viewing videos on the web.

This site needed Real, that site needed QuickTime, some other site needed
Windows Media, and yet another site needed Some Bullshit Player 4 which only
ran on Windows 98 on a good day.

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thwarted
Apple must have the last website that still requires a plugin, Quicktime, to
view videos on their web pages. This seems odd since most of the videos are
marketing related, and they are making it _harder_, not easier, to be marketed
to. It doesn't matter how good the quality of quicktime is (if it is better),
it's not a video if I can't watch it.

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Kilimanjaro
Never. The web was built on open standards, if we let somebody put a toll
booth we're screwed.

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viggity
what toll booth? Silverlight's implementation is open enough that the Mono
project was able to clone it with moonlight. You can serve it from any server,
too, not just IIS. In fact my buddy is serving it off of Apache.

~~~
Kaizyn
I think you need to go back and look up the definition of 'open standard'.
Someone figuring out how to reverse engineer one company's product
implementation does not make that either 'open' or a 'standard'. What's needed
is a written specification that is not subject to the whims of any single
company and that anyone who wants to can build an implementation of.

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olefoo
I would ditch either or both of them in favor of a functional open-source
media environment.

js + svg + ogg OR whatever

If you want me to take sides in your standards war give me something worth
fighting for. Freedom.

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darkxanthos
__rolls eyes __I thought we were talking about watching video online not
ending world hunger or tibetan oppression.

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kragen
You know, transmitting video has proven to be a pretty important tool for
fighting world hunger and various kinds of oppression; when it's possible to
see the problems other people are experiencing, it's a lot easier to empathize
with them. So it might not be a great idea to let one company decide how our
video-transmitting technology is going to work and who gets to use which parts
of it.

To be more concrete, imagine:

"The video you have selected ("russians_in_tskhinvili_getting_shelled.wmvx")
is not viewable in your region ("Georgia"). Please contact your system vendor
for a software upgrade if this region is not correct."

"New Adobe Explosion 2012 offers video content providers a usage-tracking
feature, which provides accurate statistics on the age and gender breakdown of
their viewing audience, enabling video content providers to micro-target
advertising content. *Information about users' identities will not be
disclosed except pursuant to an order from a court in one of the following
jurisdictions: United States, China, India, Saudi Arabia, or Germany.)"

"The United States Trade Representative is pleased to announce a new accord
with Brazil, addressing both American media companies' concerns related to
rampant Brazilian internet piracy and the new Brazilian military government's
concerns related to subversive content from overseas. Under the accord,
effective starting 2Q 2011, only properly licensed video codec software from
Adobe, Microsoft, or Apple will be permitted in Brazil."

"We're sorry, but the license for the software that created this audio file
("Grandpa Telling Us About His Mother.flvx") has expired. Please contact the
content provider to request that they renew their license in order to access
the content."

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river_styx
Definitely Silverlight. I generally avoid Microsoft products, but the .NET
framework trumps AIR any day.

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lbolognini
Except that in silverlight you can't use the whole of .net, just a subset.

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viggity
The .net framework that is included with silverlight has pretty much anything
you would ever possibly need when running inside a sandboxed environment.

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sh1mmer
I would pick Flash for a number of reasons.

It has a lot better x-platform support for it's IDEs. This is important
because if you are creating anything at all rich you are going to have
designer and coders working on your stuff. Constraining them to a single
platform reduces the amount of people who would be willing to work on it.

Flash also now has Flex which allows you to code and compile. Depending what
you are doing this is great to have designers and developers on the same
project.

Finally people are used to building stuff using the Flash IDE. While
Silverlight might be the best thing since sliced bread I'd rather use a
technology I know I can just find a contractor for in about 10 minutes.

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jamongkad
If I were to choose the lesser evil of the two. I thinki it would be Flash. As
it seems more "open" than Silverlight. I mean look at the amazing piece of
software that is HaXe and the slew of true 3D flash applications on the
internet.

IMHO I never knew what Flex is all about. Even going to their website it seems
a bit vague to me. Learning MXML adds a layer of complexity that I'm not
willing to work with. AIR OTOH seems promising though.

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swaroop
MXML is to HTML as ActionScript is to JavaScript.

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msie
No. MS is not as committed to the OSX platform as Adobe. Look at what happened
to the Mac versions of MSN Messenger and Internet Explorer.

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icefox
Would microsoft provide a binary for the iPhone? How about my custom browser
on my odd cpu?

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sgman
yes

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lbolognini
I'm using it at work and absolutely hate it: if feels unfinished in almost
every aspect. Try to use it yourself to do something nice and not simplicistic
and you'll see it yourself.

Now it appears that only Microsoft's evangelist and members of the silverlight
team are using it. All the blog postings/tutorials are posted by these people.

I feel that if a technology is naturally good you'll want to use it yourself,
but this requires an army of payed bloggers to be pushed down the throats of
developers.

Also, what problem is silverlight trying to solve? I feel it's trying to solve
the i-dont-know-html problem in the end... well, i dont have it.

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sarvesh
Not unless I need some feature in Silverlight or Flash that can't be
accomplished by Javascript or Javascript based Framworks (e.g. Cappuccino). I
just don't see the point of putting my users through the pain of installing
them.

