Fear of Silverlight Gaudiness Thursday, December 17 2009
When Java applets were all the rage, every website had the reflecting text Java applet (the "Lake" effect). Here is an example of the lake effect with a picture. If you don't remember these, you're lucky.
If you do remember these, you should recall that animated GIFs were also all the rage. Pictures like this gem:
Or perhaps this commonly used one:
Back then, it seemed like the web was nothing but a place to put tacky websites. The more your website moved the better. It was no longer okay to have a website that was plain and looked static. Your website needed some pizazz! This behavior has started to fall by the wayside as more and more designers get their hands on the web. The concepts of a well designed site are permeating throughout the internet and even people who would normally produce a gaudy website now have plenty of resources to make things look good.
Then Microsoft released Silverlight. All the Silverlight demos initially focused on how to animate and how to produce an incredibly tacky application. Want to skin your application? No problem! Your standard input button can have a plain blue background, white text, glow red when hovered and turn yellow when clicked! See how easy it is!
Internally, I feared that every application would begin to look like this:
So far, it appears my fears are unfounded. There are plenty of examples of how to ugly-up your Silverlight application, but so far it seems there are enough good resources (both built-in and external) that provide reasonable amounts of good looking styling for applications. The Silverlight toolkit has reasonable themes, Infragistics has a whole sample browser trying to help people create good user experiences, and my own experience has been that people are looking for only the right amount of flash.
So I beg everyone building Silverlight applications and Silverlight content and styles: please keep things looking good. The first one of you to build a Silverlight Lake effect on Text will get evicted from the internet.
