Here is a matrix that compares these three platforms competing for the future of application development.
|
Silverlight |
Flash/AIR |
HTML 5 |
| MP3, AAC, WMA, WMV, VC-1, H.264 with DRM support | MP3, MP4, M4V, M4A, 3GP, MOV, VP6 , H.264, Speex, with DRM support | Fragmented: Ogg theora and H.264 |
| XAML | MXML | HTML/XHTML |
| C#/VB/IronPython/IronRuby | ActionScript | JavaScript |
| UI Controls | UI Controls | Rudimentary UI Controls with 3rd party tools like jQuery UI |
| GPU rendering with Bit Map Caching. Software-only HLSL Pixel Shader 2.0, no vertex shader | GPU compositing. Shading effects created using Pixel Blender processed by GPU. | No GPU processing, pixel shader |
| Offline mode | AIR is the offline mode | Offline HTTP Cache |
| Isolated local storage | SQLite support for local storage in AIR | Native web storage |
| Data access over WCF, POX and ADO.NET data services, TCP sockets | Data access over web services, LiveCycle Data Services, BlazeDS and TCP sockets | Data access over JSON |
| MMS, RTSP, RTSPT, HTTP Streaming | RTMP, RTMFP, HTTP Streaming | Open web socket but not real time streaming |
Special thanks to Glenn Qiu.
Sky Cliffs 