We have a reputation that we support open standards ... so how open is Silverlight ?
It seems to be on a similar lines to Flash, Microsoft retains the reference implementation, and there's an open-source wannabe implementation struggling along behind. Both have a reputation for being "closed source", and Silverlight is of course tarnished in the eyes of many by the Microsoft link.
If we are to support either, Flash would make more sense, it is as close as you can get to an ubiquitous plugin - but as noted below video codecs are probably beyond what is sensible to do with it.
Are there any stats to suggest there are a significant number of people who have Silverlight but not Java?
Conrad
Thanks, GerardM
On 5 February 2010 22:53, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com Simetrical%2Bwikilist@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 3:39 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
This is clever-ish:
http://www.atoker.com/blog/2010/02/04/html5-theora-video-codec-for-silverlig...
He says there that this will Just Work on ~40% of Windows boxes. Not
bad.
Cortado works wherever Java is installed, which is probably quite a lot more machines -- including Safari on Mac, for instance. If we used anything non-Java, it would surely be Flash, which has much greater penetration than Silverlight on all platforms.
Yes, Cortado works in more places but there is no reason that BOTH can't be used, extending support to places with silverlight but without Java.
Additionally, although cortado will work the Java ~1.1 VM that came with Navigator 4... it's rather slow except in the latest JVMs. I expect that a lot of systems with silverlight are not running an especially modern JVM.
Flash isn't something in the running because you still need to be using encumbered media formats to use it... unless you're only playing audio: There are several independent Vorbis implementations for the flash virtual machine, no video codecs yet, and sadly the flash architecture is no where near as nice as the silverlight one for remote-loaded codecs so you have to completely reinvent all the media infrastructure.
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