IRONIC UPDATE: Later in the day, I went to look at Bob Muglia's blog post clarifying his Silverlight/HTML5 remarks, where he provided a hyperlink to a PDC session on "Building Business Applications Using Silverlight 4." I work on a Mac running Firefox, and clicked on the link, only to get the message that I needed to download the latest version of the Silverlight plug-in to view it! As I don't have administrative privileges to do so, I could not view the presentation. There's an argument for HTML5 if I've ever seen/heard one!

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The reaction to Microsoft's statement, from this week's Professional Developers Conference, about supporting the efforts behind HTML5 raised at least one eyebrow in the company's wide ecosystem. "I found the reaction a bit amusing," said Todd Anglin, chief evangelist at software tool maker Telerik, which makes UI controls for the Microsoft platform. "I think people are making a lot out of very little." Anglin noted that Microsoft has been working on HTML5 support in Internet Explorer 9 since at least the MIX '09 conference. "Microsoft's ambition to deliver a high-performance HTML5 browser has been going on a lot longer than PDC." Anglin also said he doesn't see HTML5 as going head-to-head with Microsoft's own Silverlight platform for delivering rich Internet applications. He described Silverlight as a specific technology to bring the richness of desktop applications to the Internet for deployment. "It's a best-of-both-worlds scenario," Anglin said. HTML, and specifically version 5, gives broad Internet reach for traditional Web applications, without needing to fall back on plug-ins. More interesting, Anglin thought, was the endorsement of HTML5 by Adobe, makers of the Flash plug-in for rich Internet applications. "That could be indicative of shifting support inside Adobe," he said.