Discussion:
Microsoft Announces XAML-Browser Plugin For Apple's Safari and other Browsers
geraldbauer2005
2005-09-14 03:11:56 UTC
Permalink
Hello,

Ben Galbraith writes in the blog story titled "Avalon Everywhere?
Cross-platform Microsoft?":

Another interesting announcement here at PDC is that Microsoft is
creating a subset of their cool, fancy pants UI layer (formerly
code-named Avalon, now WPF) on other platforms, including the Mac! In
fact, one of the demos involved showing vector graphics rendered in
Safari using a Microsoft plug-in.

This subset, called WPF/E, will be powered by XAML (their XML dialect
for representing the UI) and JavaScript. Sound familiar? Yes, that's
right — Microsoft also announced a Dashboard clone for Windows Vista.
Interesting…

Microsoft will never port .NET to other major operating systems, but
to have a subset of Avalon available on other platforms is a bit of a
curveball. In fact, in light of Firefox and Safari's upcoming support
of SVG and Canvas (and in the future, 3D functionality), this move
makes sense; Microsoft wants to provide their own proprietary solution
to cut off this new cross-platform initiative.

Also, Microsoft's Ajax framework, Atlas, will target WPF/E. The WPF/E
subset of Avalon will include all of the Avalon features (vector
graphics, animations, etc.) less 3D, some of their XPS features (XPS
== Microsoft PDF clone), and hardware acceleration.

In a WPF/E session, someone asked if Microsoft's WPF/E plug-in will be
available in Firefox; the speaker dodged the question ("We hope such
support will emerge…").

My first reaction to WPF/E is frankly disappointment that they
wouldn't just embrace SVG, though what I've seen of 2D XAML makes it
look a while lot like SVG with different attribute names and various
other differences. I wonder if XSLT will do the trick there…

Lack of many of the Avalon features in WPF/E, notably hardware
acceleration, really makes it seem that the strategy is to make apps
work on other platforms, but make them work poorly compared to Windows
— motivating users to switch to a Windows platform.

Source: http://galbraiths.org/blog/?p=12

Comments? Thoughts?

- Gerald




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