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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5482843" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, the problem is there are no good choices. Silverlight is proprietary and only runs on Windows and Macs and only on desktop OSes. It is also unlikely Apple will ever allow it on their mobile devices (look how hard they fought to keep Flash off the iPhone and iPad). One day it MIGHT work on Linux based devices curtesy of Mono and Moonlight, but that could be years in the future and now that MS is gung-ho on pushing Windows Phone 7 they will do everything in their power to keep SL off Android. I wouldn't hold my breath there....Flash is just plain ugly as the butt of a catoblepas. It does have the virtue of being supported on most every platform but writing complex apps in Flash is an evil nightmare. In any case creating a UI that would be serviceable on a desktop PC, an iPad type device, and a mobile phone for the CB seems like a big ugly hairy pig of a job in and of itself. HTML5/JS in theory might be the best alternative, but it is only so in theory. In practice trying to build a complex app that ACTUALLY works reliably using these technologies on 8 different browsers is the biggest nightmare of all. Beyond that you have at least 25% or more of the people out there using old as death browsers like IE6 that simply cannot possibly handle that technology. On top of that there are really no good tools for building complex UIs using web technology that are of a high enough quality to build the CB with. I mean theoretically they sort of exist, but you'd have to hire a whole team of experts just to build that UI and it is a very expensive way to go.The virtue of SL is that, bad a choice as it is, MS has very high quality UI design tools for it, and the people doing the development for WotC are obviously deeply embedded in the MS tool space already. Thus SL was by far the cheapest and fastest way for them to get anything out there, and in other respects no worse than anything else.The real truth is that unless you are some huge shop like Google that has limitless funding and can throw 500 engineers at a problem building complex web based apps is a terrible thing to have to try to do. WotC is not just building a complicated application, they are doing it with tools that are on the far side of the bleeding edge of what is even possible and it will probably be MANY years before the situation is enough better that we will see ubiquitous support for things like online CB. It may well never happen.</blockquote>

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