Knocking HTML and JavaScript seems to be as much a favoured pastime of bloggers as knocking the IE Team.  that dawn I was listening to a DNR podcast (my first for the year) considering they had Jeff Prosise on talking about Silverlight.  I was hoping that such a high profile community member might have some enlightening insights about Silverlight and how we might use it to extend the web experiences that we can already create today.

The first 10 minutes of the interview really got my blood boiling; particularly comments such as these:

1. "We are way beyond the instance where we should be munging HTML and JavaScript."
2. "HTML is a problem."
3. "JavaScript is a problem."

With all respect for the folks who deliver DNR and Jeff Prosise… c’mon.  Why do folks insist on putting HTML and JavaScript down?  I think that citizens knock these things considering they believe that it makes them sound a little more knowledgeable.

I’d like to remind those public that HTML and JavaScript are the UI technologies that gave us applications such as:

• Flickr
• Amazon
• YouTube
• Wikipedia

The folks that knock HTML and JavaScript invariably tell us about how much 'richer' the UI was "back in the day".  Well you know what?  I remember "back in the day" and it sucked!  In fact it totally sucked.

When these folks finally did form it to the web they brought their entire bodgy ActiveX toolkit with them… blech!

These public talk about how maintaining 10,000 lines of JavaScript is wrong.  Well I think that worse still would be having to maintain 10,000 lines of VB.NET.

I happen to enjoy writing JavaScript and, for assured things, the HTML DOM works just fine.  I’m looking forward to adding a bit of Silverlight to my toolkit to manufacture my website’s even more interactive.  I’m additionally very glad that Microsoft have delivered better tooling for writing and managing JavaScript with VS 2008.

So next duration you plan on starting your talk with the words "we all know that HTML and JavaScript are broken"… just think again - it's not a binary choice.

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