Microsoft's SVG talk a prelude to IE support? Microsoft is making positive noises on SVG, raising the possibility it wiil support the 2D graphics specification in Internet Explorer. The company has said that since joining the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) SVG working group in January, it has been working on ironing out ambiguities in the spec. The IE team …
Yes, I'm sure SVG support is coming, but don't expect it to match Opera or Firefox in version 9 or even 10.
I reckon they'll add a token support in IE9 that will be utterly useless, frustrate web developers who still can't make proper use of it because of IE's market share and the fact that support is so weak that it'll be easier to keep using Flash or JPGs.
Then they'll have a proper stab in IE10, but it'll still be incomplete and full of quirks (like zooming and transparent PNGs in IE7). And it'll be slow and CPU heavy.
They'll probably follow the same lines as RSS and introduce it as the Windows SVG Platform™ or sommat, installing it as a component that the OS and apps can use. Installing it will allow Excel to export graphs as SVG or vector graphics to be embedded in Word, etc. They might even update Paint in Windows 8 to include some vector tools and let you save your images as SVG, though I wouldn't be surprised if MS come up with a variant on the format that allows you to combine vector and bitmap graphics in one file, the way they want it done.
They'll probably also offer a few suggestions for related DOM objects and properties that will be quite useful, but not many people will notice because they're all moaning about how rubbishly it draws things.
SVG is really, really nice. However, it doesn't have a chance on the web till it's usable by a reasonable percentage of users. Until IE loses sufficient market share, that means IE support is a need to have for SVG adoption to take off among websites.
Otherwise SVG will remain a pretty plaything for the folks who would rather eat a rancid Big Mac fallen into a ditch near a chemical plant in New Jersey than have anything to do with M$. That's a position I happen to respect, while unconvinced of its realism.
And let's also hope M$ has grown past its EEE habits of old.
"Microsoft told The Reg in 2008, the reason SVG didn't make it in IE 8 along with other W3C standards was because it wanted to do a "good job" on the implementation with lots of tests"
No. In 2008 they were still clinging to the hope that they could smother SVG entirely in favour of some proprietary crap like silverlight. Come 2010, it now looks like the rest of the web will move to open standards with or without Microsoft, so they'd better play catch-up.
This is good news. The war against IE6 is also good news. The war against flash is good news. Perhaps 2010 will be a good year.
I'll believe it when I see it. MS with pretend to throw a strop, write sexy tools that generate "professional SVG documents" with "enhanced features to leverage the power of the web" that will only work on IE.
MS does not want standards to be open and easily applied by anyone.
A bit like Google really.
M$ aren't the arrogant, self centered company they once were. Years of legacy support, anti-trust lawsuits and security vulnerabilities have broken their will.
They are now a slow moving behemoth, having to check even the slightest change with several dozen departments for compatability and legal issues.
Not exactly the right ingredients for innovation, but EXACTLY the right attitude required when designing a standard. Google couldn't even write a web browser that complies with the windows standards, so why the hell would you entrust them with W3C?
Google, Mozilla, Apple et al are all too gung-ho, and this has been borne out in every disscusion that M$ have stepped into.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
