I’ve had some ideas for a more, let’s say, “animated” web site, but frankly large-scale Javascript development is tiresome and the thought of delving into Adobe Flash or Flex or AIR or whatever they call it now is too depressing to contemplate.  With the release of Silverlight 3, I figured it was a good time to take a hard look at the Silverlight platform to see what it can do.

The more time that goes by, the more I find the platform of HTML + CSS + Flash + Javascript + whatever else to be a horribly kludgy way of delivering an application to a user.  It’s not surprising, though, when you consider that it’s the product of 20 years of stacking stuff on top of other stuff without any overall goal or direction.  I’ve often wished that we could start over with a brand new paradigm for delivering “rich” applications over the Internet.

Of course, they say HTML 5 will solve everything, but I’m rather skeptical considering it will still have CSS and Flash and Javascript and whatever server-side platform serves up the markup.  Plus it’s created by committee.

Adobe AIR is also very fashionable right now, but I have not been impressed by Adobe’s technical expertise in recent years, and cursory examinations of the platform reveal it’s just a layer of abstraction over the same old crappy HTML and Javascript and Flash.

Enter Silverlight.  I’ve only spent a couple of days looking over the tutorials and documentation, but Silverlight 3 seems to have all the elements I’ve been looking for.  Well, really just one element:  Consistency.  It’s all .NET from end-to-end, with a consistent style and vision, from the server-side all the way down to the client-side.  None of this mish-mash of technologies from 100 different minds.

I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do with Silverlight.