Silvery Library

The Library of Congress has signed an agreement with Microsoft to make the library’s collection of historical artifacts more immediately available, this is what we read. what that means is that the library of congress surrendered a pretty important part of america's cultural heritage to Silverlight, proprietary and inaccessible technology. that is so sad.

it is easy to imagine how some library IT folks are talking with their friendly Microsoft salesdroids, which show them spectacular demos of how colorful and beautiful everything could look if they just used this new Silverlight thingy. of course, Microsoft tries to push Silverlight in every possible way, and if you manage to find some technologically challenged library people who are willing to give away some public property for your marketing purposes, that's almost too good to be true.

so congratulations to Microsoft to secure another tiny bit of the web for spreading their goodness. imagine how nice it could have been to read this instead:

The Library of Congress has signed an agreement with Microsoft to make the library's collection of historical artifacts more accessible. Microsoft agreed to get their act together and finally remove at least the worst bugs in their IE browser and make it compliant with existing standards. Microsoft also agreed to conduct usability and accessibility testing with all major browsers on all major computing platforms, and to fix everything for free if some content happens to be presented in a way which makes in inaccessible to Web users.