“I like Silverlight but I also like HTML5…which is best?”

FIGHT! ( apologies if you don’t watch Harry Hill ).

It’s been a good week for controversy fuelled by social networks. Stephen Fry’s been in hot water for what he didn’t say about women. The BBC’s been in hot water for what they shouldn’t have said about Bob Geldof.

And Microsoft’s been on the receiving end of a tonne of tweets and blog posts around what was said or, more to the point, what got left out at Microsoft’s PDC conference in Redmond last week. The BBC even jumped in on the act (although, once again, I’m not quite sure that they got the story right).

PDC (Professional Developer’s Conference) is a big event for Microsoft and the themes of this one were the newly released Windows Phone 7, the updated Azure cloud computing environment and the progress of standards-loving IE9 towards release.

PDC was also short (2 days not 5) this year reducing the usual 3-4 keynotes down to 1 and that keynote focused a lot on the 3 topics above but didn’t include lots of other technologies including Microsoft’s rich internet app technology, Silverlight.

With the emphasis on Internet Explorer 9 and HTML5, it wasn’t long before blogs started to show up with a message of;

“HTML5 sought for questioning in disappearance of Silverlight”

and the Silverlight hash tag on Twitter with people pronouncing the “death” of the technology which, it’s worth remembering, is only 3 years old.

The speed with which online folks will retweet a simple message (and especially one around “death”) is astonishing and it reminded me a little of when Zak Braff had to make a YouTube “Proof Of Life” video.

The outcome is that on Monday, the situation got clarified both here and here and definitively here with the upshot being;

1. Silverlight is very important and strategic to Microsoft.
2. We’re working hard on the next release of Silverlight, and it will continue to be cross-browser and cross-platform, and run on Windows and Mac.
3. Silverlight is a core application development platform for Windows, and it’s the development platform for Windows Phone.

and so HTML5 and Silverlight will co-exist as client technologies with different capabilities.

Capabilities aren’t everything though, there’s just one facet of the debate – for a deeper discussion, read more here.