Blog posts tagged: svg

In 2003 I purchased a book by O'Reilly on Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). It was a great book and I had high hopes for what I was learning, but it remains one of the only things I've learnt that I have not had the opportunity to use in a professional setting.

SVG has long been deserving widespread adoption on the web, but the one browser that really matters has not had support for it. Sure you could install 3rd party plug-ins, but native support is needed for widespread adoption. That one browser without support has been Internet Explorer 8 and below.

That is up until now. The MIX 10 conference was held from March 15-17, 2010 and the Internet Explorer team announced that they have support for SVG in version 9. Looks like they're about 10 years late, but better late than never.

Some milestones:

• SVG was initially released late 2001
• Firefox and Camino have had support since 2005.
  
• WebKit which Opera and Safari are based on has had support since 2006.
• Microsoft relases .Net framework 3.0 which has support for XAML

Does SVG pose a threat to Silverlight/XAML?

In 2006 Microsoft would probably of said yes. Today they would say no. I would also say no.

Silverlight and its XAML markup provide a full application description format.

SVG is more of a graphic file format and offers minimal programming support via a script tag typically using Javascript.

That being said, when possible I would prefer to use SVG.

It took Microsoft 5 years to finally release version 7 of IE.

Internet Explorer 7 has no original ideas and it is largely just copying Firefox and Opera's features. It is an improvement from version 6.0, but I'm largely disappointed overall.

You would think that a company like Microsoft would have support for emerging standards like SVG. SVG is the acronym for Scalable Vector Graphics. I remember reading the SVG recommendation which was created by the W3C almost 6 years ago. I knew that although browsers didn't have built in support for SVG, that eventually they would.

Today I see firefox and others with built in support. Microsoft decided that this extremely important technology should not be included.

Had IE7 included SVG support, the internet would be a different, better place. Microsoft has ruined that, and as usual they have shown us just how little they care bout web standards.

Does your browser support SVG? If you can't see this than go get firefox here

Note that you can get SVG plug-ins from Corel Corporation and Adobe, but IE should have included built in support for it. Maybe adobe paid them off so that SVG wouldn't be a competitor to Flash and Microsoft's newer crappier similar product to flash.