codedread

I had an epiphany of sorts this morning when discussing something with a colleague. Mind you, my day job now revolves around SVG so I am definitely biased but: If you wanted to create a vector image that is displayable on a variety of platforms and products, the only format that makes sense these days is SVG. It IS the interoperable choice for vector graphics. We have a lot of things to thank for this:

• Wikipedia’s adoption of SVG as preferred image format
• Browser take-up of native rendering: Opera, Webkit, Firefox
• Platforms like Qt and Gnome continuously improving support for SVG
• Mobile industry take-up of SVG as the graphics format of choice (even mandated by 3GPP in Europe)
• Continuously improving tool support: Inkscape, NetBeans, Xara, Sketsa, GIMP, Ikivo
• Toolkit and CMS are now starting to take-up SVG: dojo and drupal
• Lots and lots of Free Clip Art (woops, the secret is out)

It’s definitely a different world than it was 3-4 years ago. I don’t think there’s anything stopping the SVG train. Based on this, I think Microsoft and renewed Adobe support of SVG is inevitable. It’s just sad that we’ll likely have to drag them kicking and screaming (and only after Silverlight gets decent penetration, probably).

WTF. Microsoft actually listened to feedback. Internet Explorer 8 will interpret web content in its “best standards” mode by default. Here’s the press release. Thank you!

Good way to garner some praise just before MIX08. Now we wait with baited breath for later this week, when news from MIX08 about IE8’s support of other standards (beyond CSS2’s Acid) will percolate up into the blogosphere.