An interesting question a friend of mine asked a couple of days ago on Twitter, would HTML5 beat WPF?
In this short post, I’ll try to answer this question and share my personal thoughts on this very interesting matter. One thing I would like to mention here is that my knowledge in WPF, HTML5 are not strong and wide enough to compare these two domains, that’s why I will be speaking my opinion from a technology point of view not technical.
In my mind, no technology is lasting forever. Our excitement for today’s innovations will fade away tomorrow as the industry involves and new technologies come to market. Just think for a second, how excited were you the day you learned that MS is releasing a new Win32 technology called MFC and how disappointed were you when you got the sad news of MS letting down MFC for other technologies such as WinForms? Every technology comes and makes a lot of success in a defined era and then goes away. This being said, I am pretty sure many WPF principles and paradigms sush as MVVM, data binding, UI/domain layers decoupling can be reused in different technologies. One thing for sure, HTML5 might have a chance to knock down WPF but that will only happen on the web development ring, standalone applications can still be built with this later technology and have a great success on the market.
You’re right about HTML5 most likely coming out on top on the web development side of things. But WPF need not sweat in the sight of HTML5. It is still very useful.
@Sprinkler buff: Indeed, being a very late comer to the WPF world, I still think this technology has a long way to go and will not die any time soon.