A Brain-Dead Library of Congress Decision
In the “WTF” category, someone please tell me news of the Library of Congress deal with Microsoft to adopt Silverlight is an early April Fool’s joke! A public agency whose purpose is the openness of information adopting a proprietary technology?! And this happens just as the LoC has been doing really good work on better exploiting the open technologies of the web?
I’m too disgusted to say much else, and will be contacting my Congressional representatives on this one.
’tis true, I’m afraid. No April Fools joke here. Adobe’s Flash is just about as proprietary, I suppose, but at least it has ubiquity going for it…
Right. I’m actually impressed with what they’ve done with the HTML-only section of that site, and would prefer they dump both Silverlight and Flash, neither of which are open. Maybe this was just a dumb management decision; don’t know.
I say this, of course, as news of OOXML squeaking through ISO is starting to trickle out, something the LoC also endorsed.
A similar technology decision is that of the british library: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html to show books using silverlight, or shockwave, as far as I can tell, solely to simulate turning pages. What’s the point? Google books manages smooth scrolling thru books with nothing but javascript, and HTTP. why not stick with that?