.Net Jonesie - WPF/E & Platforms

Saturday, December 09, 2006

This is the first weekend in several months I’ve had time to catch up on geek stuff. It’s a nice rainy day (geeze, the weather sucks this year) so I plan to keep my dressing gown on and read and write blogs all day. Apologies for the sickening image of that.

WPF/E was released in CTP last week. If you don’t know what it is, think Flash, but for .Net & XAML. I haven’t had much time to do more than test out the samples so far, but the runtime is only 1mb and is available for Windows & Mac already with good support for the 2 main browsers.

There are as many applications for this as Flash but my feeling is that WPF/E will attract a bigger market than Flash because:

XAML for the desktop will translate painlessly(?) to the browser or device
Javascript is still used so no huge relearning curve for the hard stuff
The runtime is small but very powerful
It’s targeted at devices of all sizes and configurations
It’s 8(?) years newer
It will have great developer tools available from day 1 (Expression, Visual Studio etc)
It has Microsoft behind it

My dream is that XAML will kill HTML & CSS. Now wouldn’t that be a great day?

Noticeably absent from the list of supported platforms is Linux. It’s not even planned. The stated reason for this is the lack of Linux clients. If you take a look at some public browser & platform stats, e.g., then this is in fact true- < 5% is hardly worth a mention :]

More interesting in the W3School stats is the trends in screen resolution, javascript acceptance and browser usage. If you are coding public web sites then you should keep an eye on these sort of stats, but do remember that these are for the whole planet and your particular market segment is likely to be quite different. For example, the stats from the www.dot.net.nz site are very heavily biased towards Windows platforms and browsers with high resolutions and 100% javascript acceptance – as you would expect from a highly intelligent Microsoft focused developer community. I’m sure the stats for SlashDot are considerably different.

Saturday, December 09, 2006 9:45:36 AM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

Comments [4] General |

Saturday, December 09, 2006 11:17:20 AM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

Spoke like a true .Netter.

Yes wouldn't that be a great day. Kill HTML and CSS, because why bother with accessibility. Let's not worry about the small percentage of sight impaired people out there. Which fits well with your general premise for not supporting other platforms. Anything less than 5% just shouldn't be bothered with.

Anonymous Coward

Saturday, December 09, 2006 12:10:39 PM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

Who said that XAML doesn't provide better accessibility than CSS/HTML? I would have thought it would be a lot easier to code those sort of features. You can do a lot more with simple XAML than you can with simple HTML/CSS - or at least do it a lot easier. If accessibility is an issue for people then I'm sure they will be drawn to the platform that works best. The same can be said about Linux v Windows. If Linux was better then it would be more popular... oh, well maybe that argument doesn't work so well, but you get my drift.

As for 5% - this is just a sensible business decision. Why spend $$$ on a small market segment when you can cover 95% of the market for much the same cost? I think it's pretty ambitious for Microsoft to provide WPF/E for 95% of all desktops.

I wonder what % of sight impaired people use Linux ? 5% of 5% ?

Oh, and being anonymous is not cowardly, but it does make it harder to craft relevant responses. Be bold. Don't be afraid to say what you think publically even if you make a dick of yourself (not that you did of course) - I do it all the time and sometimes I even learn from the humiliation!

Peter

Saturday, December 09, 2006 12:25:13 PM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

Okay, maybe based on my screwed up understanding of Microsoft products, but if WPF/E (shit codename, btw) works the same way as Flash then it hardly provides the same level of accessibility as HTML+CSS. However easy it is to code in. A blind person can use text-to-speech readers to scan a webpage, for example; sight impaired can use their own stylesheets to make a site more readable, and so on. Will that be possible in your dystopian XAML future? I doubt it.

Note, I'm not saying that there's no place for rich browser interactions, because there is, but if XAML manages to kill HTML & CSS, it won't (IMO) be a great day at all.

Anonymous Coward

Saturday, December 09, 2006 12:37:57 PM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

Thank fully WPF/E is a code name but I doubt the official name will be any better - probably something like "Windows Presentation Foundation Compact Edition for Cross Platform Solutions and Devices unless your on Linux or are Sight Impaired".

But this sounds like a challenge. I feel like a challenge. Give me a couple of hours to try to wip up or find an example.

Peter

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