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February 28, 2006
Expression vs web
Expression vs web: Wayne Smith of Microsoft has some context on Sparkle for web work, as opposed to platform work. Scroll about 2/3rds down, to the "WPF Everywhere" section, where they discuss environments other than Vista and WinXP: "That's a little way in the future. WPF/E will make a subset of the WPF available to other platforms and to a range of devices which have yet to be decided, although I think we have announced that it will be available for the Apple Macintosh. Build work is proceeding but at the moment it's very much at the stage of being defined and specified. There aren't any dates attached to it yet, but I can say that it certainly won't be a reality in the immediate Vista timeframe, so for instance it's not something that Expression Interactive Designer will initially target. It'll be a future version of Interactive Designer that will work with WPF/E... Ours is more of a platform story than a player technology. Yes, the WPF/E will also be in effect a player, but it is designed to extend the reach of WPF, rather than being a separate entity in itself... where we're different [from Adobe] is that we're not trying to be technology-agnostic. We are very clearly in the ASP.NET camp with Web Designer, and we drill down very heavily into it." This seems more in line with how many of us were reading the story a few months ago, rather than the "Quartz vs Dreamweaver" type of stories that were in the press at the time. Microsoft's in the business of providing a deeply-integrated operating system; Adobe's in the business of providing a neutral media/interactivity layer atop the wide variety of the world's devices. Both take advantage of good technology like vectors, HTML, data-binding, and the rest. The news about Expression seems to be that it will be easier for designers to work in a straight Windows environment, and it won't be coders-only anymore.
Posted by John Dowdell at February 28, 2006 4:59 PM