Come on then, who's bought a Silverlight For Dummies book..?

riddlermarc

riddlermarc

riddlermarc

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"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.'"
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http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/redesigned-microsoft-website-to-use-silverlight/

Seems Microsoft are really pushing this, they are worried it will get lost in the historical dust.

And how slow is it?! Check out http://www.onlinespotlight.no/en/Christmas07/ - I thought Flash sites were bad (they are) but that is ridiculous..

If Microsoft insist on "upgrading" their site I fear I am going to have to install the framework purely to access the MSDN pages :(
 
have they even released a linux compatible plugin for silverlight yet? I personally hate flash and silverlight so I won't be buying any books!

edit: no, they haven't
 
LOL they want me to install something to "enjoy their website" ??

And it doesn't like my browser. How original (FF2 & Ubuntu).

I think they have some serious issues.
 
I can see where MS are coming from with Silverlight but that doesn't mean I have to like it. The W3C is such a slow-moving behemoth that the standards-based web is in danger of stagnating in the next 3-5 years due to lack of progress in the underlying tools we build it on.

There's only so much you can do with current HTML and AJAX (ok there's a lot you can do but it's never going to be on-par with a full rich-client interface) but there is no sign of any new standards compliant tools (HTML5, XHTML2, CSS3, take your pick) on the horizon. Some estimates put HTML5 10 years away - they're in huge danger of being left behind and becoming irrelevant as users start to expect a desktop-style experience in their browser apps.

I don't know if anyone has been following the recent furore in web developer blog land after Andy Clarke called for the disbandment of the current CSS working group because he believes it's dead in the water. Zeldman doesn't think so, and while some of what he says makes sense, there is clearly something broken if it takes a standards body decades to agree on where we're heading.

It worries me as a developer that due to this dallying, we could be forced back down the dark road of proprietary add-ons, browser / os sniffing and all the rot we've only just managed to escape from. MS promises cross-platform support but history shows that they can't always be trusted in this respect.

And Adobe / Apple are no better, we need an impartial group that can say "this is how it will work" and then tell the browser vendors to go away and get on with implementing it. Unfortunately the W3C is completely crippled by the vendors all having their own interests and priorities, whilst also having a say in the decision making.

IMO Apple, MS, Mozilla, Opera et al, should be on an advisory panel only and have no actual control over what gets passed as standards. The decision making should be left to people who truely have the best interests of the web at heart and are not influenced by corporate concerns.

Oops, that turned into a bit of a rant :) It would be interesting to hear other forumistas thoughts on this issue.
 
Agree with everything there, good post. It is almost like an Italian football club where the majority of the hooligan fan groups are represented in some way in the board room; thus rendering the club incapable of kicking the fan groups out of the organisation.
 
I agree with you LazyManc but tbh, until the user agent vendors (as in M$) bother to get off their asses and make a standards compliant browser instead of cocking everything up for everyone, we are all sat waiting.

This monopoly (even if it isn't a monopoly, it is a *mind* monopoly) is really starting to aggravate me, so sick of normally intelligent people using internet explorer out of habit and wondering why things are going to crap. I was forced to use Vista on my brothers PC over christmas and it was such a pile of crap, it didn't even recognise USB keys but kept popping up "asking for permission" to do normal things. But hey, thats my little rant on M$.

If people can't understand that business does *not* automatically equal quality of software, then screw them. Why should I pay for their ignorance?
 
Thing is, right now people should be using, at least, IE7 (by at least, I mean IE7 or any browser that's better - guess it's better to say not IE6, but now I'm labouring the point!). If they are happy with the horrible version of the internet that IE6 serves (and it IS horrible - the way sites render in comparison with Firefox/IE7/Opera is nowhere near as good), then that's their problem.

I've probably said this before on here, but I think it's a valid way to work. I've taken to implementing a bare-minimum approach to IE6. Make it work, make sure it doesn't look like thisiswalsall, then put it away. Why should you spend stupid portions of development time on a browser only used by people who don't care enough about how the internet looks to use a decent browser?! give your time to the people that want to see it properly. To my mind, it would be totally foolish to just *drop* support for IE6 because, as everyone knows, they've still got a ridiculous market share - the site should simply work (create an IE6 design if need be - something simpler that doesn't stifle your creativity and make other users lose out). I've also implemented a small reminder box for new visitors - nothing intrusive, just a "your viewing experience could be improved by upgrading your browser regularly. you might also like to try these for further improvement" type thing. If they say "don't care" then they're never bothered again, as long as they use that IP address/cookie.
 
Shoseki said:
I agree with you LazyManc but tbh, until the user agent vendors (as in M$) bother to get off their asses and make a standards compliant browser instead of cocking everything up for everyone, we are all sat waiting.
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It is getting better slowly - IE7 is a step in the right direction, and the noises coming out of the IE team show that they are making a proper effort. Hopefully we'll continue to see improvements with IE8 (Acid2 is a great start) - IE's major problem now is having to keep backwards compatibility with all the mistakes they made in previous versions.

Bear in mind that MS is a massive corporation and I'm pretty sure the Silverlight team is a completely seperate entity from IE - we can't blame the latter for the former.

The W3C should be like the British Standards Institute - they create a standard, and the manufacturers make a product to meet that standard. If the product is up to scratch, it gets certified (e.g. the kite mark logo), if it doesn't, then a big deal can be made about it not working correctly and the manufacturer can be shamed into fixing it.

The way it's worked in the past is more like:

W3C: "hey guys, we've got these, like, recommendation things, what do you think?"

Moz: "hey, that looks great, we'll get on it as soon as we've fixed these memory leaks"

IE: "erm... well.. we've already kind of got this one but its called something else and we don't really want to change it, and that other thing is just plain daft, and this one will take too long, so we'll leave it out for now"

OP: "Is that all you've got? C'mon, where's the rest? Man, I hate that IE fella, he eats babies, honest"

W3C: "oh right, cool, so you'll call me? ....Guys?"
 
The first time I installed Silverlight plugin it crashed my computer several times.. Hate it!
 
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