Letters from Readers

HTML5 Rages On

Visual Studio readers sound off on HTML5; some love it, others, well...

Our September cover story -- "HTML5 for ASP.NET Developers," authored by VSM Tools Editor Peter Vogel -- generated some questions and stirred up the debate among readers about the future of client development:

How do you see HTML5 affecting XAML? Do you see Microsoft moving to a client GUI framework that's powered by HTML5? Perhaps XAML will be upgraded to leverage HTML5 under the hood?

Philip
South Africa

Tried running many examples from this article in IE9, Chrome and FF6 ... 90 percent fail, inconsistently displayed and so on. Whoever thinks HTML5 is the future of client development is nuts, or an overpaid idiot CEO, COO, CFO, wannabe-CEO of some major corporation.

Steve

Silverlight/XAML is great technology; however, the 400-million-plus connected devices expected to be added to the market by 2015 are most likely going to be HTML5-centric. It's time to move to standards on the client side, leverage the best of the Microsoft stack and become client-agnostic when possible.

Randy M.
Saint Joseph, Mich.

Peter Vogel responds to readers' comments:

Philip: I can't see much of a rapprochement between XAML and HTML. XAML is a far more powerful and flexible tool than HTML5 and, where they do share functionality, they do it in very different ways. While it might be possible to create a tool that generated HTML from XAML, I think you'd lose so much in the translation that you wouldn't really know what you were getting. It might be possible to create a tool that generated XAML from an HTML document ... but much of HTML5 is the new JavaScript API. I'm not sure how that would work. I suspect that, in the .NET arena, they'll remain two different technologies working in two different regions. If you want ease-of-client deployment you'll pick Silverlight or HTML+JavaScript. If RIA is critical and reach is not, then you'll go with Silverlight; if reach is critical and RIA is not, then you'll go with HTML+JavaScript.

Steve: Hey, I never said this code would actually, you know, run ... yet (as the sidebar indicates). And there are some wrinkles: If you were playing with the Web Messaging component, for instance, you could get that to work in Safari or Chrome provided you enabled it (it's turned off by default). Try your samples again in six months or at the end of the year and you'll be pleasantly surprised.

About the Author

This story was written or compiled based on feedback from the readers of Visual Studio Magazine.

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