Jon Udell: Rewriting the Enriched Web

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John Udell has a post about the implications behind the Silverlight DOM being accessible by JavaScript and implies that you could use Greasemonkey-like tools to actually rewrite Silverlight applications on the fly. One of the reasons he’s excited about this is that he saw a bunch of people able to learn and manipulate pages using Greasemonkey and they could go through that same learning process with Silverlight:

Greasemonkey unleashed a flood of creativity by enabling developers who are not the authors of web pages to enhance the behavior of those web pages in ways that can be profoundly useful. I hope we’ll see similar effects in the realm of Silverlight. And if we do, I hope they’ll enjoy the same cross-browser reach that Silverlight itself does.

It’s kind of interesting to think about. Though the non-binary file has its downsides, there are a lot of intriguing things about it and it may appeal more to the open community.

[tags]Silverlight, John Udell, Greasemonkey[/tags]

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  • http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd John Dowdell

    I tried to read him, but couldn’t find the source citation for someone’s browser rewriting the XAML they receive.

    Do you know where that link is? Where’d that line come from…?

    tx, jd/adobe

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    Source citation? I’m not sure he had one, but his links are backwards, so you may be looking for this one – http://wpfesdk.members.winisp.net/quickstart/scripting-frames.html#dynamicallycreating

    Because you can create XAML objects right from JavaScript, so the Greasemonkey idea seems accurate.

  • http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd John Dowdell

    Groovy, I had a bunch of clicked browsertabs open but not that one, thanks Ryan. :)

    … hmm, but I’ve read that page before, and it doesn’t explicitly connect with Greasemonkey-style user-initiated modifications. The combo seems logical, but did Jon have a proof-of-concept in among the other links on those pages there…?

    (The balance between author control and user control has always been a contentious one, so such a difference could be a valuable criterion when comparing technologies.)

    tx, jd/adobe

  • http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft Mary Jo Foley

    Interesting. I wonder if “Springfield” — Microsoft’s pending mash-up tool (which I think was formerly code-named “Tuscany”) will serve as the GreaseMonkey equivalent.

    Here’s what I wrote about Springfield recently.

    http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=393