Whenever I start talking about the problems of
ActiveX 2.0, someone will bring up the fact that when you're using JavaFX, Flex or Silverlight
"your website just looks the same in all your browsers".
Since I am a little bit tired of this statement I thought I'd write up some specific arguments against that exact mindset. But before we move on to whether or not the web is being "fixed", let us first try to define the "web". According to Wikipedia the definition of the web goes something like this;
"The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and W3 and commonly known as The Web, is a system of interlinked hypertext documents contained on the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them using hyperlinks. Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, English physicist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, wrote a proposal in March 1989 for what would eventually become the World Wide Web. He was later joined by Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau while both were working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1990, they proposed using 'HyperText [...] to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will', and released that web in December. The World-Wide Web (W3) was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project. If two projects are independently created, rather than have a central figure make the changes, the two bodies of information could form into one cohesive piece of work."So let's break those points down into their distinct parts with a little bit of logical reasoning here and apply them to Silverlight, our current choice of platform to dissect here....
Hyperlinks
Silverlight have no concept of Hyperlinks. To create "deep linking" in Silverlight is basically impossible, and there is no way you can link from one "Silverlight Document" to another...
This is an inheritingly important quality of the web, and without it you may have created something great, but it sure as hell is *NOT* web...!
Documents
Silverlight have no "documents". A Silverlight application may contain documents, but it sure as hell is *NOT* documents in their own. Silverlight applications are basically IL [Intermediate Language] code, which is a kind of "Assembly Lookalike" type of code that will execute on your computer. To parse this is basically as easy as parsing x86 RISC Assembly Code to put it another way...
"Contained on the internet"
This might be stretching it a little bit, but I'm still going to say it anyway. Silverlight is "not contained on the internet". At least not anymore than any other .EXE file is. Silverlight is downloaded to your machine, and then executed as any other .EXE file. Silverlight is nothing else than a fancy way of distributing WinForms applications. Basically nothing more than a fancy version of "Click once Deployment". I realize that also HTML documents are being downloaded, but they're *documents*. So the argument "contained on the internet" at least makes much more sense for HTML than for an .EXE file being downloaded and parsed locally on your computer.
And it also so happens to be that Microsoft is pushing the "off line" Silverlight mode these days so strongly that you could very much be able to run your Silverlight applications without even having a network card in your PC...!
"With a web browser"
Here Microsoft themselves have eliminated the browser by making "off line, desktop scenarios" themselves. You don't need a browser anymore with Silverlight than you need with any other type of ActiveX object. Though just like an old style ActiveX component, also Silverlight ActiveX components happens to be possible to display within the browser. But only if you're on Microsoft Windows, version x build y and with the "correct" browser.
"View pages"
...do I really need to pick this one apart...? ;)
"navigate between them using hyperlinks"
You cannot "navigate between Silverlight Components" anymore than you can navigate between different .EXE files. I will agree that it is possible yes, just like the same way you can have a "visit us link" in your About Window in your old-style Windows application, but it's not natural, and it's a big mess getting even the most naive linking to work...
"using concepts from earlier hypertext systems"
Here Microsoft should get some credit, because Silverlight *IS* built on "earlier concepts". It's built on ActiveX. But it has about as much to do with "hypertext systems" as pooh has to do with roast beefs.
Conclusion
I could go on like this forever, but basically what the only conclusion possible to draw from this is;
Silverlight is not, have never been, and will never be *WEB TECHNOLOGY*'
Silverlight has *NOTHING* to do with "the web". Now if Silverlight is not the web, how can it fix it? It's like claiming that fish is fixing the problems of sliced bread...!
Now the "fixing" parts
The web is *NOT* broken in any ways. In fact the web is the most marvelous invention ever invented, and it is working 100% perfectly!
There is however a very large web browser that is broken. For those who haven't heard about it yet it's called Internet Explorer.
If I create a website and makes it display perfectly in FireFox, then it will display perfectly also in Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, Konqueror and basically any other browser you could imagine. Including all the phone browsers which you can find on gadgets such as iPhone, Androids etc...
Do you think that it is a coincidence that the ones who "want to fix the web by letting you use Silverlight" are the same people that also happens to sabotage it...?
I think not!
So when Microsoft tells me that "Silverlight is fixing the web" I feel as if they're pissing me down my throat and explaining to me how it's my fault since I happened to put my face in the place where they already had planned to go pissing...!
Sorry Microsoft, I called it as I saw it, and I am not alone...
How's your Silverlight adoption numbers going these days...?
Do you really have the guts to keep on pushing this crap onto us thinking that we're going to change our minds somewhere down the road...?
Let me say something directly to Microsoft here;
"Microsoft, you need to *STOP* publishing Silverlight. In a not too distant future you will have alienated so large portions of your own community and pissed them off so seriously that the only ones left for you to profit upon, will effectively be your MVP's and Silverlight Evangelists...! *DROP* Silverlight and either put IE to a rest or start maintaining that piece of crap...!"The one thing I want to leave you with today is that Silverlight is not "fixing the web" anymore than the H1N1 Flu is "fixing rush traffic" problems. Silverlight is not an answer, Silverlight is a question. The answer is *NO*...!
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