Post-PDC HTML5 v. Silverlight Debate

I’ve been an advocate of Silverlight since it was called WPF/E, so I am not quite an unbiased observer. I decided to sit back and watch the twitterverse explode and see what the world thought. The Silverlight guys got angry; the ASP.NET guys got glib; the open source guys ignored us all.

In case you haven’t seen, this was the Mary-Jo Foley article that started it:

• http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-our-strategy-with-silverlight-has-shifted/7834

I’ve seen a couple of blog posts on it including (in no discernable order):

• Jeremy Likeness: http://csharperimage.jeremylikness.com/2010/10/so-whats-fuss-about-silverlight.html
• Robby Ingebretson: http://blog.nerdplusart.com/archives/silverlight-and-html5-and-your-future

I looked for some blogs on the otherside, but I found most to be either smug (e.g. “See Microsoft will always fail”) or off the point (e.g. “Silverlight failed because we hate IE6”). If you have some to share, please add a comment.

So What Do I think?

My view hasn’t changed in the last few years on this (and it didn’t change today):

• Silverlight is good for Apps; HTML is good for sites.

That’s it. I didn’t say use the words “only”, “must”, “should” or “can’t”. Its all a matter of your priorities.

Flame away please… ;)