Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 12th Feb 2009 08:05 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
Novell's Miguel de Icaza has announced on his blog that Moonlight has hit the 1.0 milestone. Moonlight is the open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight technology, a framework similar to Adobe's Flash. Silverlight has already been used during the Olympic Games and President Obama's inauguration for streaming those events across the internet.
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Member since:
2005-12-31
> Do we really need or even want Silverlight ?
You can answer this question for yourself, and possibly come to the conclusion that *you* don't need it. However, just as with Flash today, you may voluntarily lock out yourself from a lot of web content by doing so. Moonlight cannot answer that question for you, it just provides the ability to use Silverlight content with non-MS OSes.
However, I suppose that your question reaches even further and actually asks, "does the world need Silverlight?". Well, users will decide whether they want it. It is, however, close to being mad to think you could *prevent* Silverlight from becoming popular *if users want it*.
> A simple example would be the HTML5 video-tag, a good
> implementation of that would make a lot of the video-content
> easily available.
The video tag is late to the show. Flash has already secured its position for video-on-the-web, and even Silverlight has to offer a lot to supplant it. The video tag, in contrast, offers even less than Flash does. If the video tag had come with full features and full browser support before(*) Flash did, then it might have had a chance.
(*) In this sense, 'before' does not refer to the time when some super-nerds first showed the idea or a roughly working video tag, but rather the time when it actually worked in all major browsers.