Comments on: The VML changes in IE 8

By: blinkingmarquee

blinkingmarquee — Thu, 14 May 2009 00:37:08 +0000

DD Roundies (Rounded corner emulation in IE – http://www.dillerdesign.com/experiment/DD_roundies/)
and Raphaël (SVG emulation in IE – http://raphaeljs.com/ )

have mentioned the slow as molasses problem.

Does anyone know if IE 8 implemented SMIL 3.0?

By: ucanmexwise

ucanmexwise — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:08:45 +0000

There is an additional problem when accessing VML elements by using get/setAttribute. The simple solution is following:

if (document.documentMode==8) {
ele.opacity=1;
} else {
ele.setAttribute(‘opacity’,1);
}

By: CaptainN

CaptainN — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:17:30 +0000

The biggest current use for VML is to implement SVG using client js libraries, or to minimally pull of SVG like affects. I find it annoying that MS seems to always break their supposedly standards based technology when they are offering something that clearly competes with it (Silverlight). IE8 being a slight exception (and only because they are getting hammered on that front).

MS must hate their web developers, to always make so much work for them. I think a Flash SVG implementation should be created more to spite them than for any other reason. Either that or create a Mozilla or WebKit based plugin. Google extends IE through Gears – the OSS community could do the same for other missing features, like JS2.0 (if we ever get here), audio/video tags, and SVG.

I work in the industry as a web developer and many of my clients are really getting tired of hearing about why they can’t have this or that because IE doesn’t support it. Many of them would be happy to use a plugin if they though it had enough penetration – and they do, they use Flash. I think there’s room for a Mozilla or WebKit based ActiveX control at this point.

By: loginx

loginx — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 13:07:26 +0000

I’m in agreement with Joeri on this one. I can’t think of other reasons to not offer canvas support and to degrade VML reliability/performance other than to lock developers into proprietary plugins.

By: Joeri

Joeri — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 07:05:09 +0000

Why would they make VML work for us when they have a perfectly good alternative in the form of silverlight? /sarcasm

By: elazutkin

elazutkin — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 06:57:08 +0000

Sigh. Going from IE6 to IE7 we lost some VML functionality and gained some new bugs. IE7 to IE8 transition met my expectations 100%: even more bugs, worse performance, harder to work with VML, the standards mode is completely broken (it was half-broken before). I am almost afraid what the coming IE9 (or whatever it will be called) is going to bring us.

By: SergeyIlinsky

SergeyIlinsky — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 06:51:45 +0000

The most outstanding change however (my favourite) is the drop in VML rendering performance. Rendering VML fragment in standards mode in IE8 is about 10 times slower compared to IE8 quirks or previous IE versions.