Recently, Microsoft has released its answer for Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash called Silverlight. It, very much like flash, allows for ‘Rich Internet Applications’ – basically interactive, ‘pretty’ web applications, movies and other media.
Silverlight is, in some ways, superior to Flash because it contains textual content that can be searched from your browser… making it easier to interact with. However, this text is in XAML format (visit Wikipedia for an explanation) which is Microsoft’s own proprietary XML based markup language. It is, in some ways, very useful for creating web applications. XAML no doubt will be familiar to people who have worked with asp.
The problem with both Silverlight and XAML is that if these technologies become popular, Microsoft would be able to deny compatibility/accessibility to people who didn’t use windows, or charge for compatible browsers. As far fetched as this may seem, Microsoft did not include support for Opera thus alienating Linux users in current versions of Silverlight…
Both Flash and Silverlight seem rather inaccessible to the general public (or at least to me) in terms of development because of the high cost of development studios for both languages. (Currently you can get a pre-release version of Silverlight’s studio – Microsoft Expressions – for free. The full studio costs $699 though.) While there are free options (such as CoffeeCup for flash) these tend to be… not very useful.
Proprietary languages/technologies seem to be the wrong way to be heading, especially with Microsoft holding the cards. I do think that web designers/developers will shy away from Silverlight if there is any hint that Microsoft intends to deny support to other browsers/operating systems.
