Comments on: SVG Open 2009: SVG Coming of Age

By: blinkingmarquee

blinkingmarquee — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 06:33:07 +0000

Aaronshaf –

If you mean Microsoft, yes, this is typical.

Their ego has been wounded ever since they (and others) submitted Vector Markup Language (VML) back in 1998 to the W3C. Implemented in IE 5 betas all the way back then too. Still (mostly) works to this day – google maps uses it, lots of greats libs like raphael (http://ajaxian.com/archives/raphael-simple-graphics-wrapper-on-top-of-svg-and-vml), and DD Roundies (http://dillerdesign.com/experiment/DD_roundies/) use VML to their advantage in making the very hard, possible.

So, will Microsoft ever adopt SVG? My bets are on NEVER. Their last chance to do so, XAML, could have been SVG, with special tags. Or, it could have used SVG for defining objects in areas. Didn’t happen, so now we’re stuck with yet another vector format to deal with.

I’ve been following this issue for a long time, since late 1999 actually. Wrote a SVG2VML converter in Perl…. at the time you couldn’t display SVG, but you could use InkScape to draw and save SVG — there was nothing of the sort out there for VML.

Damn you Microsoft for being so stubborn! You lost, now be the bigger, um, “entity”(?), and integrate SVG.

By: midnightazul

midnightazul — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 01:52:19 +0000

“SVG is great as it’s part of the HTML 5 family of technologies”

While HTML5 is a catchy buzzword everyone is trying to get a piece of, SVG doesn’t fit. Sorry, but it’s been around for years and hasn’t caught on yet, IE hasn’t talked about implementing it, the spec has gone off the rails several times, etc.

By: aaronshaf

aaronshaf — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:22:20 +0000

Did anyone notice a certain major company conspicuously missing from this event?

By: JonFerraiolo

JonFerraiolo — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:29:34 +0000

Looks like my markup didn’t go through. Instead of “, , ,”, it should say , , .

By: JonFerraiolo

JonFerraiolo — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:27:39 +0000

Note that this year’s SVG Open is particularly interesting, mainly due to the arrival of SVGWeb, which brings (nearly all of) SVG 1.1 to IE, with the result that SVG 1.1 is now available across all desktop browsers – without requiring an *SVG plugin* (see below). Largely because of the great momentum of WebKit on mobile phones, SVG is also on the road to ubiquity on mobile browsers.

For those who aren’t familiar with SVG, think of HTML as an application platform, but replace the flowable document markup (e.g., DIV’s and P’s) with a PostScript-like 2D graphics model (i.e., , , ). Both HTML and SVG share the W3C DOM, JavaScript and events (load, click, mouseover, etc.).

With SVGWeb and browser native implementations of SVG, you can mix HTML and SVG within the same Web page.

SVGWeb is “zero-install” (i.e., no *additional* plugin). It achieves its SVG magic on IE by rendering via the Flash plugin, which is basically available wherever IE is. As a result, SVGWeb allows developers to build standards-compliant web pages and leverage Flash under the hood on IE until Microsoft finally steps up and supports SVG natively.