ReadWriteWeb

The change in emphasis for HTML5 away from just content and more toward functionality, coupled with a much deeper impact from Apple on the broader model of computing than even Apple's most adamant fans could have anticipated, has led to a changed scenario for the Web. By this time next year, barring any delays, the Web delivery model for the world's three most prevalent platforms - Windows, iOS, and Android - will be based on apps.

This changes the landscape for developers like Mozilla and Opera Software, whose value propositions to date have been based around building better browsers: If the user now bypasses the browser icon and goes directly to an app, how does a browser maker convince customers that there's value in swapping out the engines that run their apps - components which, like graphics cards, they probably never see or even care about?

There's a good possibility that Microsoft may have made a bigger splash by exiting the keynote address and booth presence at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show than it made by being there in the four years leading up to 2012. If CES were an accurate barometer of consumer sentiment, then today we would all be snug in our vibrating chairs with our femtocell-enhanced home wireless phones (with built-in universal remotes), watching HD DVD movies with "TV Everywhere" live interactive background feeds on our plasma screens through our VIIV media PCs, and with mobile TVs in our shirt pockets feeding us live sports scores via AOL's colossal media empire.

In 2006, the spotlight of the Bill Gates Microsoft keynote was the music distribution service of the future. Called "Urge," it was a joint venture between Microsoft and MTV, at a time when the "M" in the latter's name stood for "music." Users would pay $9.95 per month to stream music videos directly to Windows Media Player 11, and receive songs in a format that was not portable to devices like iPods. That was followed up by the phone service of the future, called "Windows Live Call," which would be integrated into digital HDTVs by way of a partnership deal with DirecTV and Verizon.

There are some products that appear to have been doomed to circumstance since birth - that despite the most ambitious goals, the grandest intentions, and often the wildest strokes of luck, still manage to end up on the wrong side of public perception. No more prominent example exists in the history of software than Microsoft Silverlight, a textbook case of a platform that was never, for one moment, given the benefit of a doubt.

It did not help that its original title, circa 2006, was "Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere" (WPF/E), which sounded like the catch-phrase for a neoconservative protest movement. And it really didn't help that its producer had attained a reputation for defining the Web by default, building less-than-ideal browsers and technologies and broadcasting them into ubiquitousness by tying them to Windows.

When Microsoft premiered Silverlight as something called WPF/E in 2007, it was with the idea of enabling developers to build "rich Internet applications," and to conceivably run them outside of browsers, and on platforms other than Windows. The "A" in "RIA" stood for "applications" - the full word, the complete class that also includes data-intensive programs such as Word, Outlook, and Photoshop. Yet such applications required full access to the file system, which was not possible given the limited trust relationship that must exist for a remote application triggered from a browser.

Over four years later, Silverlight finally has perhaps its single most requested feature. Called P/Invoke, short for "platform invocation," it's a system that enables an application to deploy itself remotely, and then implement the safeguards required for it to elevate its own privilege to that of an installed application. Silverlight 5 is finally here, and if you're wondering why you can't hear the fanfare, it's not because HP open-sourcing webOS has drowned it out. It's because, although Microsoft isn't saying so formally today, S5 is probably the end of the line.

Spokespersons for Microsoft and all other sources on the subject are remaining mum today, after an unofficial general release deadline of the end of November for the next edition of its Silverlight Web apps platform passed quietly. The Silverlight 5 project had been launched as the evolution of Microsoft's graphical platform for Web functionality, though that was before the company's dramatic shift in preference to WinRT as the Web apps platform of choice for Windows 8.

Late yesterday, Microsoft's spokespersons were unable even to confirm that Silverlight 5, whose release candidate remains available now, will make general release in 2011. However, a launch announcement page posted earlier in the year continues to show 2011 as the promised timeframe. One spokesperson would only say that further news would be revealed "in the coming weeks."

One of the unambiguous messages we heard from Microsoft's Build 2011 conference in Anaheim all last week was that development of HTML5 "Metro-style apps" for Windows 8 would be "plug-in free." All requests for Microsoft to "clarify" that rule only underscored the blunt reality of the statement: HTML5 is about the absence of plug-ins, and thus, Metro will have an absence of plug-ins, including Microsoft's own Silverlight.

In a company blog post dated last Thursday, Adobe platform business developer Danny Winokur said his company expects for apps installed in the Metro Start Screen to be capable of supporting Adobe's AIR platform, one way or the other. His comments echoed an emergent theme from Adobe - a clever effort to rework the HTML5 "openness" theme in Flash's favor. By being platform-agnostic, the argument goes, HTML5 should look the other way when any plug-in is being utilized.

We've probably all worked in organizations where we've been put in charge of projects we believed in with all our hearts and half our salaries, only to see them superseded long before their time was up. We've been in Scott Guthrie's place. Until just last April the champion of Silverlight as a Web app development platform, Guthrie now finds himself in charge of Windows Azure, the company's cloud platform.

Corporate conferences each have their own heroes, and Guthrie is one of Microsoft's most-liked, including at Build 2011 in Anaheim. Not long ago when these conferences' principal products were metaphors, attendees cheered and some even begged for folks like Guthrie, Steven Sinofsky, and a while back, Bob Muglia to take the stage. (Muglia is now Juniper Networks' Executive VP for Software.) Today, it's the soft-spoken, sensible types who lead the show, at a time when the operating system itself is looking more and more like one of Ray Ozzie's "service disruptions:" bold, scalable, and metaphorical.

The Windows Runtime library (WinRT) is the principal provider of system services for applications in Windows 8 that will be designed to incorporate the new "Metro" style. Officially it is not a replacement for any part of Windows we have come to know. But it is becoming abundantly clear that use of WinRT in the way it's intended, including with Microsoft's upcoming round of developers' tools, will move Web apps developers away from Silverlight, the company's existing redistributable runtime platform.

The new development platform for so-called Metro apps is called WinRT, short for Windows Runtime. Its name suggests its potential future place as the principal runtime library for Windows. Developers who have already embraced the .NET Framework may find themselves shifting positions to make room.

WinRT is not the replacement for .NET. However, as Microsoft Windows engineer Aleš Holeček told a press gathering at Build 2011 in Anaheim, it will present a new foundation for an alternative app model for Windows that Microsoft will promote as the modern style of Windows development.

Microsoft is already ditching is much criticized "native HTML5" term. "I don't know that you'll see us refer to native HTML in the future," the company's new Internet Explorer Evangelist Ari Bixhorn told The Register today.

Other than a change in terminology, nothing else is changing. And Microsoft is sticking to its guns regarding WebGL, so I still fear that fragmentation will continue.