the 2008 beijing olympics on the web will be hosted by a Silverlight-based web site, which means that (a) it will be be full of unnecessary and annoying eye candy, and (b) it will not be accessible to linux and solaris boxes, and non-intel macs. i find this pretty scandalous, given the fact that the olympics are supposed to be a global event, and not some platform for making the world adopt Silverlight.
no doubt there will be many Silverlight apologetics who will argue that Silverlight allows a much richer web experience. like the flash fanatics, they will say that Silverlight is the next level of web evolution but they are wrong. Silverlight may be good for building rich web-oriented applications, but like flash, it is not an appropriate platform for building an accessible web site.
it was somehow to be expected that some web designers with rather little understanding of the web would take over such a huge and profitable project and turn it into some multimedia playground with compromised accessibility. the only thing i am really wondering about is whether the important people actually knew what they were getting into, or whether they actually believed that this would result in a decent web site.
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