Microsoft
Silverlight is a browser plugin that allows web
applications to be developed with features that characterize
a rich internet application: animation, vector graphics and
audio-video playback.
Silverlight competes with products such as Adobe Flash,
Adobe Flex, Adobe Shockwave,
Java FX, and Apple QuickTime. Version 2.0 brought
improved interactivity and allows developers to use
.NET languages and development tools when authoring
Silverlight applications.
Silverlight provides a retained mode graphics system,
similar to
WPF and integrates multimedia, graphics, animations and
interactivity into a single runtime. It is being designed to
work in concert with XAML and is scriptable with JavaScript.
XAML can be used for marking up the vector graphics and
animations. Textual content created with
Silverlight would be more searchable and indexable than
that created with
Flash as it
is not compiled, but represented as text (XAML).