Microsoft and HTML 5

I have become a real fan of HTML 5. I learned this summer that as the spec is being refined portions of it are already being included in the major borwsers, except of course, Microsoft’s. The word from Microsoft is that they feel HTML 5 os “too dangerous”. Chris Wilson, Microsoft’s IE architect, has blogged about this at http://blogs.msdn.com/cwilso/. He’s also complained about the “negativity” of those who disagree with Microsoft – I mean his – opinions. THis is his “personal” blog after all.

For those of you who missed the $3 billion ad campaign, Microsoft is investing heavily in a “new” technology called Silverlight. Silverlight is basically a retreaded version of Flash, but one that the blue badges can make money on. HTML 5 overlaps much of Silverlight’s abilities. See for example the canvas tag, already implemented in Firefox et al (but not IE). So while the open source community is moving towards building the things people want to do right into the browser, Microsoft is holding back, looking for ways to cash in. Nice.

What really cracks me up about this is that, while they’ve thrown a lead weight around HTML 5 they are publicly making a big deal about their “support” of open source. I recently was told by an Apache committer that Microsoft has donated $1 million to ASF (the Apache Software Foundation) and at Apache con they made big noise about their open source embrace.

I guess this Mac vs. PC video says it all.