Silverlight beginning to grow momentum
14th April 2008 by David North
Microsoft’s Silverlight seems to be gathering steam and is getting lofty predictions from industry monitors that it’ll triple its use within 18 months.
It’s major competitor, the current undisputed market leader, is Adobe Flash but I believe in the long run Silverlight should at least start to give Flash a run for it’s money which is only good for encouraging innovation even more.
Comparing Flash against Silverlight isn’t really fair we should be looking at Adobe Air which gives a whole platform to work with in a similar way to Silverlight.
I have to agree with the predictions from the article I can see Silverlight adoption growing rapidly. However I don’t necessarily see Flash market share suffering hugely; at least at first. Generally Flash is a design tool (I accept it can do more but ActionScript isn’t a good development language in my opinion) and I can’t see the Flash lovers changing over to Silverlight quickly or at all. Flash does what they need - if it ain’t broke why fix it?
In which case how is Silverlight going to take off? Well it provides an amazing tight development platform - server-side and client-side coding along with multimedia all tied in together. The idea of XAML is very exciting allowing the development of user interfaces that just weren’t possible before. Also because it’s the next step for the .NET framework the great number of existing .NET developers that will adopt it causing it to grow quickly. Also Microsoft have been very clever here as Silverlight can be treated as a development platform or a design platform depending on your strengths and therefore the software package you would use therefore hoping to steal the Flash market. Finally Microsoft are truly trying to make Silverlight cross-platform and cross-browser to maximise the market potential in a similar way to Flash.
I for one will eventually move onto the Silverlight platform - I’m currently monitoring it’s success to ensure the community around this new technology is mature enough to support it fully.
I am keen to start adopting Silverlight as part of my web developing tool kit and the sooner the percentage of web users that have the plugin installed on their computers the better. I am sure Microsoft have thought about what I am going to say next. I hope they have. Flash took a long while to ‘grow up’ and become a platform which could be used in an accessible way and rolled back to alternative content with the development of SWFObject. I would like to see Silverlight gracefully degrading to a version which does not require the plugin as a ‘catch all’ for visitors to my sites. Without such a facility we will witness a return of web masters without a grasp of usability and standards plonking a dirty ‘Silverlight version’ | ‘HTML version’ entry page.
From my initial investigations (I haven’t had a chance to dig too deep yet) it seems that search engines will have no problem with the XAML produced by Silverlight as it compiles to the XML standards. Therefore pages should be able to be crawled in any case.
With regards to degradation according to whether Silverlight is installed or not my understanding is that this does take place. I’ve also seen some cool XSLT used to transform XAML into XHTML on the fly.
With regards to accessibility I’ve no idea though. Not sure if screen readers are trying to port to Silverlight or if they are going to rely on the degraded version.