Microsoft and HTML5
I don't think Microsoft has been quite as "tight lipped" as it seems. Microsoft is working hard to implement HTML5 in IE. IE9 has a fair amount of HTML5 in it, and they are working closely with W3C in the development (especially on the test suites). Because Microsoft is sticking to a more traditional, fewer releases schedule, it seems like they are lagging. They've responded by moving from one IE release every few years, to one per year. If that seems slow, consider the chaos that Mozilla is creating by moving to one release every 6 weeks, breaking extensions left and right and making it hard for enterprises to use it as their standard browser. IE10 is already in a "preview" so it is definitely available if you want to get an idea of what HTML5 in it will look like.
The "Mango" update for WP7 brings the full IE9 browser into the phones, so HTML5, as supported by IE9, is now supported on WP7. In addition, apps can now host the browser, so it is easy to make an app that's just a viewport to an HTML5 app.
This funky out-of-browser thing that they are doing with HTML5 in Windows 8, they are delivering that information at the BUILD event, which is in late August or September, if memory serves. We'll know more details then.
My personal stand? Silverlight is more capable than HTML5+CSS+JS, particularly around things like graphics processing, multithreading/parallel processing, access to hardware, etc *If your application needs these*, then Silverlight is the better choice for a cross platform, out-of-browser (and maybe even in-browser) experience. If you don't need these capabilities (ie: typical data driven apps), I'd be using HTML5. Indeed, that's essentially Microsoft's stance as well. With WP7 now getting HTML5 capabilities, I'd bet that's soon going to be the party line on WP7. They've openly said it about Silverlight in the browser, and my guess is that they'll say the same about Silverlight on the desktop at BUILD. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see Silverlight essentially phased out in favor of the full WPF stack on desktop too, and relegated to being "WPF Light" for WP7-only.
J.Ja
