Visiting the Silverlight Gallery in a Flash
Having heard of Adobe Flash’s would-be competitor earlier this month, I finally went over to the Silverlight Gallery to see how it significantly differs with Flash. A plug-in is needed to view Silverlight movies so I first downloaded the Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 beta plug-in and installed it. It’s a good thing that the developers included support for Firefox and Safari browsers in their beta release, though support for Opera would be much more appreciated.
The demo on Silverlight’s homepage was impressive. It featured a variety of people exploring menus in 3D, like the one you’ve seen in The Matrix.
Silverlight’s demo tells a lot about its capabilities and it makes one want to see more. I did go further and viewed some of the demos in the Showcase area. Somehow, I could not get the links working in Firefox so I just went ahead and explored the Community Gallery instead. I’d say that the demos can be done in Flash. However, Silverlight seems to emphasize 3D in its demos.
3D graphics may look good on Silverlight, but what would make one favor it over Flash? According to Wikipedia,
Content created with Silverlight will be more searchable and indexable than that created with Flash as it is not compiled, but represented as text (XAML)… It also supports common dynamic programming languages like Ruby and Python, which are more flexible and syntactically expressive than JavaScript or ActionScript.
Searchable and indexable content is one aspect that Adobe Flash hasn’t addessed yet. Add to that a wide array of support for emerging programming languages like Ruby and Python, Silverlight surely has potential.
How about support for Web standards and the open source community? As you’d expect, proprietary is Microsoft’s favorite word and plans for supporting a competing format or community are always last on its agenda. To get things straight, SVG and Linux aren’t supported in Silverlight. Will we see a change of heart soon? Let me ask you this. Since when did Internet Explorer support PNG?
Silverlight is definitely favorable among SEO’s, but with the existing methods and technologies do we really need another plug-in? My answer is, at least not for the Web.
May 28th, 2007 at 10:12
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May 6th, 2008 at 1:32
I think you (and Wikipedia) hit the nail on the head with the Silverlight assessment. This XAML “taggability” could be a key advantage of Silverlight, as every bit of media will be indexed by Google for monetization. Microsoft needs a home run with Silverlight, especially since Adobe has done as great job with embedded 3D in Acrobat Reader 8.1.
June 23rd, 2008 at 6:08
looks like wonderful
August 6th, 2008 at 6:44
Looks unbelievably good.
August 8th, 2008 at 5:15
Interesting I didn’t even know this product existed. I recently read that Google can know index flash files. I wonder if this will stunt the growth of the Silverlight product
August 14th, 2008 at 2:33
Thanks for the insight into Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 I didnt know that it existed either but I will be looking into it.
Thanks!
August 20th, 2008 at 5:17
awesome article. MS Silverlight is amazing
August 20th, 2008 at 7:30
Looks like Microsoft has got something there. I wonder when they will reach final release status.
August 21st, 2008 at 14:12
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August 22nd, 2008 at 3:01
Nice gallery … good article
August 23rd, 2008 at 4:32
Interesting articles and posting. Microsoft Silverlight is real good.
August 27th, 2008 at 21:59
I did heard of Microsoft SilverLight before but haven’t really understand how good is it. Thanks for the insight into this program, hmm…might give it a try