> But what about intranet apps?

Remember when IE6 was so incredibly easy to work with? Remember how much effort has been dedicated to port those internal "web applications" that worked on one specific browser?

You're comparing apples to oranges. IE6 is a browser, Silverlight is a plug-in. Using Silverlight doesn't mean that you can't switch browsers.

As long as your browser supports the SL plugin.

Incorrect. Silverlight runs out of browser.

Oh... You mean using Silverlight for intranet applications without a browser...

That's an interesting idea. Allow me not to take part on it.

You're allowed. I'm also allowed to not be held hostage by a "standards committee" that never gets anything done.

Wouldn't you say HTML is at least partially done?

You know you are hostage of a company that may discontinue the technology you depend on any moment they want, right?

I prefer being hostage to Microsoft rather than Apple, the Gnome team or the KDE team. Outside of building your own OS and your own user interface, you only have slightly more of a degree of freedom with 'nix.

At least my master gives me a 'created-date' field on every file. Gosh, that makes sense. I'd have to write my own file-system or use some outdated, unsupported crap to have that on 'nix.

It can happen with Apple, if you rely on a proprietary technology they control, but it cannot happen with Gnome or KDE because, if you don't like what they do, you can always roll out your own.

I see you are unfamiliar with modern *nix OSs. Mine gives me both creation time and access time:

  rbanffy@computer:~$ ls -l --time=atime a.out
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 rbanffy rbanffy 8378 2011-11-10 15:24 a.out
  rbanffy@computer:~$ ls -l --time=ctime a.out
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 rbanffy rbanffy 8378 2011-10-22 19:31 a.out

ctime is change time, not creation time.

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/20460/how-do-i-do-a-... "Note that the ctime (ls -lc) is not the file creation time, it's the inode change time."

So, like I said...yes you do have to roll your own to get it. Enjoy that.

Interesting. In this case, the creation time and i-node change time are the same - the file was written as new.

I see where you are going. I guess I'll have to move to FreeBSD to get file "birth time" support (or look into POSIX extended attributes). It's more or less a painless change. FreeBSD also has ZFS support, which is the filesystem to rule'em all. Either way, I don't expect Silverlight or WPF to run on FreeBSD.

A lot of companies that said the same about ActiveX are still limping along with IE6. I'd rather ask my boss to budget for more development time than to suggest rolling out a single-platform solution in 2011.

The takeaway is this: don't build your mission critical internal apps on a Microsoft browser plugin. This has never worked out well.

One really important reason is not to tie your intranet to the Silverlight/Flash/runtime N roadmap. Better to hook up to something that will run in browsers without painting yourself into yet another proprietary corner.

Yeah, let's have a richly, wonderful, HTML interface that still can't replicate desktop GUI productivity from the 90's...

I have very rich HTML+JavaScript+JSON interfaces here that make me orders of magnitude more productive than I was in the 90's, but that may be me.

OTOH, you may be tied to IE6 and unable to see all this.

Please, show me your best HTML UI components and we will compare them to the native ones or even the Silverlight ones that are available (from Telerik, DevExpress, Infragistics, ComponentOne, etc)

Can you even get a data grid that is half as powerful or has as robust an API as something like this? http://www.telerik.com/products/wpf/gridview.aspx

Can't tell. It won't run on my computer.

Which is the whole point. Gmail runs on my Mac, on my Linux machines, on my OpenSolaris server (actually, it runs OpenIndiana these days) and on my tablet. It would probably run just fine on my AIX boxes if I compiled Firefox or Chromium for them. If Google abandons it (but keep the servers running) it will continue to operate on newer computers and newer browsers until Google pulls the plug.

For a few decades people accessed email on text based terminals. There's plenty of applications with more complex UIs than email...

I have other applications with more complicated UI's also relying on HTML and AJAX and they work just fine. What kind of web applications do you have that would require Silverlight or something similar?

How about an email application that handles keyboard acceleration really well? This can be done easily with Silverlight (in or out of the browser), but not so much with HTML. That's why Gmail has crummy keyboard handling. In Thunderbird, I can tab my way around the entire interface if I want to or use keyboard shortcuts.

I'm sure the Gmail team could do a bunch of hacks to fix this, but that's the problem. You have to hack-up everything to make HTML work well as an application platform.

It does look powerful, but the font rendering is dire. So the browser gets at least one plus.

Is pagination of the data (as shown in those examples) mandatory? It seems kind of annoying to have to limit the amount of data actually in the browser at one time, especially if it's done for "performance" reasons.

Pagination isn't even necessary if you load chunks of the table as needed. You can even render proportional scrollbars if you know how large the table should be.

The trirand grid that you linked to doesn't even get keyboard or mouse focus right. It doesn't even get row selection right.

If you think that's a good grid, I don't expect you to see anything remarkable about the grid I posted.

The most remarkable thing about the grid you posted is that it won't run on my computer. In fact, it won't run on any of my computers.

Looking around my office, I gather it would run on about four or five computers out of the about 50 here.

Fine. Let's compare it to any native grid that runs on your preferred OS then.

Both of those work fine here, and there are a half dozen other jQuery grids available if you want to try them out.

You've obviously never used the Telerik components. If you want to build the thing in their demo the controls are fabulous. If you want to build anything else you'll suffer more than you can imagine. I've had the misfortune to use several revisions of the Telerik for ASP.NET controls, and the Telerik for Silverlight controls. The Silverlight controls were atrocious.

It won't even run on OS X so that's a pretty big plus for HTML UI components, given that modern web UI frameworks are all pretty reliably cross-browser.

FWIW, Silverlight does run on OS X[1]. The demo link above was for WPF. The Silverlight version is here: http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/Get-Started/Install/...

This is exactly the problem. HTML/CSS/JS is disgusting to someone who knows the power of a good native SDK.

People who only do web dev just don't know what quality is.

Quality is also your stuff running on anyone's computer, and not depending on a big company that has the power to kill your stuff and force you to rewrite it.

Sure. That's nice about HTML, but too bad you lose almost every other quality thing because of it.

I don't understand why everyone is so hung up on HTML though. The internet is not HTML, the internet is TCP/IP and all the protocols that ride on it like HTTP.

Why can't we just leave HTML the way it is, use it primarily for making nice documents and come up with something new for apps? You know, instead of trying to shoe-horn everything into a spec that has to cover both apps and documents or anything in-between?

Why isn't there a standards committee for a kit like Silverlight or Flash? The runtime would have to be built once for each platform, but that's no different than HTML.

an intranet is the sign of a lazy IT department. put that stuff up on the internet, let employees access the resources they need wherever they are, from whatever device they are using.

every discussion i've ever seen about advancing the state of the web, the sticking point has always been "what about intranet/corporate networks?". well, if you run an intranet, fuck you. stop using the idea that you control the endpoint as an excuse to write crappy apps. you shouldn't be controlling that end point, you should be giving your users freedom to access your services in as many ways as possible rather than limiting their productivity by restricting their usage to your approved endpoints.

Not that simple. There are tons of rules and regulations businesses may have to follow. Some data may never leave company premises. Some data may never leave the room it exists.

if data can't leave the room and it's on your network, you are in violation of that policy whether you have an intranet or an internet.

security policies like those are stupid, and an artifact of a time before networks. we shouldn't have to build our networks around outdated policies, security policy should be built to accommodate the technologies of the time.

We don't have anything like that here - we don't do top secret stuff - but, in that case, the machine wouldn't be on the network.

But why require your developers to learn another set of technologies? Much better IMHO to just have a good web development team who can make internal applications too.

I think most corporations already have people with C#/XAML skills.

The odds are much higher that they have some in-house web developers.

> Nobody should ever invent a competing technology

As long as this technology is easy and free for everyone to implement in compatible ways, yes, you can.

"You can" implies that you have some sort of say in the matter. Why should everyone have to implement technologies that are "easy and free" just because you say so?

Good point. You can, but you shouldn't. And I won't use it or encourage its use. In fact, I'll speak against it on every opportunity I have.

So you don't use any proprietary technology then? What kind of car do you drive?

Of course I do. But I avoid it whenever it's possible and active advocate for non-proprietary alternatives.

That's cool with me. I choose technology on quality alone, with regards to my use cases. I certainly don't tell people that they shouldn't use what they're using, I just give my opinions. People such as yourself are often telling me I shouldn't do this or that. I don't mind it, because I enjoy talking about technology and sharing my point of view. Some people just don't see it though.

I think that I understand why someone would wish to exclude all proprietary technology. No advocacy is the best advocacy though. If the product is so great, it sells itself. It does. People use 'nix all the time for the things it's good at and then they go use other stuff too. Hostility towards that "other stuff" really works against the cause IMO. Why not spend the same time an energy to make the product better? Then people will just use it and nobody will have to argue about it.