At the Media briefing for IE9 yesterday morning, Microsoft tech evangelist Michael Kordahi admitted that the emphasis on HTML5 in Microsoft isn’t going to make Silverlight (or flash) go away any time soon…
“I think there is stuff that Silverlight (and Flash) does that pushes the envelope. Those plugins have to do a better job of being bleeding edge.
“The thing about the standardisation process is that it doesn’t happen overnight. And it’s good when everybody agrees on standards. What things like Silverlight and Flash do – and are increasingly being forced to do more of – is push the boundaries.
“In HTML5, video is a progressive download video – you have a file and it progressively comes down. Silverlight and Flash allow for dynamic bitrate mid-stream. So as you’re playing video, and the connection speed dips, well it can decrease the bitrate. You don’t notice it as the user, you’ll see the quality kind of shift…
“Hardware accelerator was there in Silverlight and Flash before any browsers did it. I love that it’s now a standard and that now all browsers are going to be doing it, and what it does is force Silverlight 5 and Flash 10.2 to push the boundaries and go “what’s next”. Because if they don’t, then they become irrelevant.”
For all of Steve Jobs’ posturing, this seems like a much more accurate assessment of the whole Flash (and Silverlight) issue – HTML is driving forward, but we’re not likely to see the traditional video formats like Flash disappear unless they decide to stop moving forward.