Silverlight will set content free!

What Flash haven't been able to achieve is Silverlight's goal. Why haven't Flash replaced loosely structured HTML already!? Personally, I was expecting this to happen 10 years ago when I first saw a jumping ball made in Flash 2. Obviously, there were several barriers at that time, primarily the Shockwave Flash plug-in hadn't propagated the web yet. Further, competition has increased as HTML (the DOM) has evolved, CSS introduced and JavaScript enhanced. Flash simply wasn't up for the challenge of defining and laying out content in a accessible manor. Ohh well, maybe their focus was set differently - i guess they were, lets make games!

Having a browser-independent plug-in run on a platform-independent browser functioning as a platform for development is difficult enough to articulate so lets not even start to imagine how difficult it must be to develop. In the early days, 10 years ago, Flash was my candidate. Since then I found XHTML as the given choice. But seeing the latest version of Silverlight 1.1 portraying as a Windows-Mini downloadable plug-in for any browser on any OS (eventually) lifts my eyebrows. It is equal to mixing Java applets with Flash and most importantly setting content free! It is accessible in strict formatted XML, and so is most parts of the graphics (XAML) for development sharing (like HTML). In a way, you could say they are mimicking what's already happening on the open web with XHTML 2.0, so no credit to MS. But how big is this "threat"? They are doing everything by the book this time (given the fact that Google  eventually will index Xaml files of course).