Silverlight: Good for Adobe, Bad for Microsoft

&#62; with SVG, Canvas, Smil, HTML 5, Video, and CSS3<p>The elephant in the room is that Javascript is just not a good language to develop in, most especially for the kind of culture and processes that Flash developers use. It is difficult to maintain, it plays <i>terribly</i> when different people with different coding styles interact, and most of all it is extremely browser dependent, in terms of the behaviour you can expect to see, and equally importantly for the dramatic differences in performance you get. What do all Javascript libraries have in common? They all provide a twisty nightmare of little passages when you try to combine more than one with all of the interactions between global variables and dynamic operations.<p>Having seen the work process that Flash developers use, I wonder why anyone can even begin to imagine that some offspring of HTML and Javascript can ever even begin to make inroads there.

"Adobe should rejoice that Microsoft is competing with Adobe on its own turf (i.e., media plug-ins) rather than putting all its energy, as it once did, into Web standards and innovation."<p>Microsoft putting all its strenghts in standards and innovation?! On what planet does the author live?

The article was very interesting. Looking at the issue of the relationship between Microsoft and Adobe from a new point of view. I agree with the core concept that silverlight and flash are in one front against fully open standards like HTML 5. But I think both Microsoft and Adobe are in both sides of the battle between RIAs using open standards and proprietary plugins. They know they should contribute to open standards.