My colleagues have a heated debate on what is the future of web development. One side is supporting HTML5 and the other is supporting Silverlight. There is no conclusion of the debate yet.
In my humble opinion as a programmer, HTML5 will not improve programming productivity, while Silverlight will. In my understanding, programmers still need to program in JavaScript to take advantage of HTML5. For Silverlight, we can use C# which is static-type language. A lot of coding defects can be found in compilation time.
For HTML5, different browsers might still have different behavior even though there is spec. For Silverlight, generally what works in IE will work the same way in other browsers.
Just my thoughts. Any idea on how to choose future direction of web development?