Microsoft wrestles with HTML5 vs Silverlight futures

They should be kidding. They understand nothing about web and open standards. That is why they loose.

Silverlight is a neat technology but ultimately they limited it to just a box on a page, and in that realm it becomes just another flash substitute.

It mentions it in the article, extend HTML5 with a Windows API.

They did it before with HTML, was it HTAs? You could make controls that did crazy stuff. I can't remember the name now, my old work had a few from the days when there was no browser but IE.

HTML 5 looks more and more like the Win32 API to me (or x86 assembly). At first everyone will use it directly. But people will quickly see that its a bear to be productive with it. Then you'll quickly see new frameworks built over it.

I wouldn't be surprised if Silverlight eventually simply targeted HTML 5. You wrote your code in Silverlight and out comes an HTML 5 page.

I'm not really sure what WPFs future is. It's great technology, but the desktop is increasingly niche.

No not really - I would be much happier if browsers used Silverlight (or rather the tech behind), since it is much better than the cooked together mess that is HTML. The only thing necessary would be an open-source renderer that worked equally well on all platforms.

But given that that is not going to happen, I am rooting for HTML5.