IIRC, the Web Sockets implementation was something the WCF team was already experimenting with for their own purposes and originally had not much to do with IE9 or the IE team. Since it was implemented in WCF, obviously it would require a CLR (i.e. Silverlight).
Putting it on the HTML5 Labs site is kind of goofy, and the whole HTML5 Labs thing is sort of a dubious PR exercise to begin with, but I guess it does at least show they're experimenting with the Web Sockets protocol.
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They didn't, it still uses Silverlight if Silverlight is installed. It just falls back to other stuff now.
It used to demand that Silverlight be installed before playing anything. It no longer does, thankfully. That's what I meant.
EDIT: Argh, didn't take long to find an "install Silverlight" while browsing through the HTML5 demos site:
http://html5labs.cloudapp.net/WebSockets/ChatDemo/wsdemo.htm...
Why do they keep doing this?
IIRC, the Web Sockets implementation was something the WCF team was already experimenting with for their own purposes and originally had not much to do with IE9 or the IE team. Since it was implemented in WCF, obviously it would require a CLR (i.e. Silverlight).
Putting it on the HTML5 Labs site is kind of goofy, and the whole HTML5 Labs thing is sort of a dubious PR exercise to begin with, but I guess it does at least show they're experimenting with the Web Sockets protocol.