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Google Brings SVG Support To IE
stelt writes "Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is in most graphical tools. It is used heavily in many big projects, such as KDE and Wikipedia. But Internet Explorer's lack of built-in support for SVG was keeping it away from mainstream use on the web. Google is fixing that now with a JavaScript drop-in named SVGWeb. They've posted a quick, one-minute overview, a longer and more detailed presentation, and you can read about it on the project page."
How long before a new version of IE develops incompatibility problems with this extension?
Now Microsoft doesn't need to do it anymore. Is this a good thing then? Nice move on Google's part though.
From the project page: "No downloads or plugins are necessary other than Flash ..."
IE used to have SVG support via an Adobe plugin. Then they bought the Flash crap and suddenly the SVG plugin went away. Can't have competition I guess.
But Internet Explorer's lack of built-in support for SVG was keeping it away from mainstream use on the web.
Yes! Internet Explorer may finally be ready for mainstream use.
It's not bad performance, and useful for applets, but you don't want to use it for layout unless having dozens of little flash applets all over the page turns you on.
Using Firefox 3.5 on Kubuntu 9.04 64 bit = no love, only "browser native svg" rendering works on the demo page, none of the samples work.
Geeks don't grock information, they grep it.
the year of IE on the desktop?
... the long-awaited dawn of SVG animation challenging Flash, (and Silverlight)?
Despite the video being very very dry, there was an interesting link in the middle of the presentation: http://downloadstats.mozilla.com/
That site features real time download statistics for FF3.5. The interesting part is, that the map at the top is rendered in real SVG combined with canvas (for the dots).
About this flash based library: it's strange. At the demo page the native rendering of SVG failed and only the flash version worked on my FF 3.0.x.. Not a problem with my browser though, as the site I mentioned at the top as well as Wikipedia SVG's work fine. Something is not right with this library, but interesting non the less.
The summary misses the actual link to the demos. Here it is:
http://codinginparadise.org/projects/svgweb/samples/demo.html
Wrong. The on-demand rasterization of the SVG document tree elements is done using eigenvalue calculations on full-markov matrices, making it quite fast.
Microsoft is becoming AOL. A crappy, proprietary, expensive, unreliable impediment to getting onto the internet. Their applications have plateaued, and open-source desktop and web-based competitors are improving rapidly. They'll hang on longer, but they've begun their long decline.
Try to make a user to install any plugin in age of 2009 or better, an OS vendor to include it on their default OS install. Please try and see what happens.
One of the coolest things Google did is Google Earth plugin, perfect for directions and I tested it on one of the sites I manage for 2-3 days. Do you know what I had in return? Mails accusing me of installing spyware/virus to their systems ironically from @gmail.com! I ended up waiting for some kind of flash implementation and rm -rf 'ed all.
BTW, you are bitching about Flash for what reason? Being 3rd party plugin, abused right? Just watch how your cool, open SVG is used once the advertising agencies/designers figure it has 90% reach.
Yes rendering is done by Flash. But since Flash is installed in about 95% of computers that is not much of a problem. Not that I'm a big fan of Flash though.
Flash is not a campaign donor-independent file format.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
A terminally sick patient in Hospital will often have a 'DNR' (Do Not Resucitate) notice placed over the bed to avoid them suffering needlessly. Shouldn't the same be done for I.E?
More than just IE needs that. If Gates wants to be truly philanthropic, he'll require that all new Microsoft EULAs to require the agreeing party become full organdonors and wear a DNR Medical Alert bracelet or necklace. That way the MSCEs would not be a total waste of oxygen.
When discussions of supporting various versions of browsers come up, it is important to know what browsers are actually visiting your site. Earlier this year IE6 users to one of my sites dipped below 10%. Since then, it has now been ~3% for the past month.
Now I no longer stress about IE6. I'll check it to make sure the site is at least functional and usable in IE6. But I no longer strive for pixel-perfect compatibility. It's simply not worth it.
You can spend the extra hours getting it to work for all browsers and end up using hacks and mangling your HTML/CSS to do so, but if all of that work is only for a small percentage of your user base, it is not worth it.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
"Google Brings SVG Support To IE"
The project is hosted at google code, but this is not a google project, is it?
Now, I'm among the first to go "meh" about their use of Flash. But.
This SVG kludge certainly improves the chances of web sites deploying, where applicable, SVG solutions instead of going directly for Flash (which is SVG's main proprietary vector graphics competitor on the web). After all, if your SVG/SMIL etc will play in Flash, suddenly your installed base of capable viewers is at least that of Flash.
'course, more quality SVG tools are needed also but this is an important step towards more openness on the web.
Do they think we're stupid? Or is Google redefining words now?
OK, actually I think this is great, just bitching about semantics.
Or maybe it's not so great. MSIE shouldn't be artificially kept alive.
As much as I like the *idea* of SVG, it doesn't seem to work particularly well, even in browsers where it is "officially" supported.
Safari tends to choke on complicated images, and cannot zoom in on full-size SVG images, making it quite useless for reading maps and the like. Additionally, I've noticed that most current platforms do not include any sort of utility to view/edit/rasterize SVG images outside of the web browser. Firefox 3.5 seems to work fine, but I seem to recall older versions having issues. Here's a reasonably complex image to try for yourself.
Should we just focus on the Canvas element instead? Many browsers already have partial support, with a better/standardized specification on the way in HTML5. Some Javascript trickery should be able to add full support to older browsers.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Last I checked, IE had crappy JavaScript performance.
You need to switch to a new god. Bill has fallen out of favor.
It's still an experimental alpha at this stage, according to the project page. Promising though
Last I checked, IE was crappy.
This would be a good fit with the Ubiquity XForms implementation hosted on Google Code as well. It's aimed adding in-browser MVC (model-view-controller) support to IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari, based on another W3C recommendation, XForms 1.1.
For example, see this tutorial on how to style hints on triggers (multi-modal word for "buttons") declaratively. (This is from the SVN trunk so it will load all the JavaScript implementation files individually rather than as a single library.)
I don't think browser support is the only thing holding up SVG use. What about content creation tools? Do they have anything as good as the Flash IDE? Or are you ment to hand write the SVG code?
If you look at Silverlight (or XAML or XPS) you'll see a lot of things that resemble SVG. It would be trivial for MS to support SVG, but they choose not too. The probably don't want anything to compete with Silverlight adoption.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
Microsoft is becoming AOL. A crappy, proprietary, expensive, unreliable impediment to getting onto the internet. Their applications have plateaued, and open-source desktop and web-based competitors are improving rapidly. They'll hang on longer, but they've begun their long decline.
The true Slashdot geek can't post about Microsoft without his brain dissolving into mush. Fantasy rules and reality is an intrusion.
Listen to one of your own:
And then there's Microsoft. The company prints billions of dollars worth of profits each quarter from its Windows franchise, yet for years it has been quietly developing its next big operating system. And no, I'm not referring to Windows 7.
Microsoft has created a bridge "between personal productivity and line-of-business applications," one that stitches together Microsoft's "desktop" dominance with its cloud ambitions.
It's called SharePoint, and with over 100 million seats and $1 billion in revenue, the odds are that your company already has it installed.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer long ago declared that "SharePoint is the definitive operating system or platform for the middle tier," and I don't think he's using the term "operating system" lightly.
Increasingly, SharePoint is the center of the Microsoft universe, at least, for enterprise computing. SharePoint serves as the hub for Microsoft's suite of operating systems, applications, and third-party software. It is a content application server, of sorts, one that provides the platform upon which so much of Microsoft's value is now being built.
I've disparaged SharePoint in the past for its tendency to lock customers into its proprietary repository. But let's be clear: a large number of companies seem perfectly happy to make that trade-off and are actively using SharePoint at the heart of their intranets, extranets, and Web sites.
Microsoft, Google, and VMware redefine the OS
Matt Assay is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management.
He was even blunter when speaking to The New York Times:
SharePoint is saving Microsoft's Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in. It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping."
Microsoft's SharePoint Thrives in the Recession
"Flash sucks bleep on Linux, because Adobe apparently hates Linux or something. "
No, your assumption is mistaken... in fact, Linux is becoming more important to Flash over the next year, as smartphones and televisions introduce new configurations.
For performance which is slower than other machines, first try checking for background processes or browser chokepoints... that's easier than checking for hardware which creates the difference.
Then look into the Player betas, feedback process. If we can make your slowdown happen in the shop too, then we'd want to try to ameliorate that situation within the common Player, thanks.
jd/adobe
Google hosts the SVG world conference Oct. 2-4, presenting an update on SVGWeb and about 60 presentations from others
Sorry, I once worked on a site, where we got 16 million visits *a day*! And that's only for the top country.
Yeah, we've all "worked on" big sites. It's quite another thing to be financially accountable for a big site. You'll find it's a little less easy to cast away 10% of your users overnight when your profit margin is only 1% to 3%.
The proper way to build a big site is to build to standards and then add exception handling for any significant user bases. Over time some of these will shrink below the "who cares" limit and you can get rid of that exception. Obviously those limits will vary per site and audience.
Your rant about leadership is fine, but you do not lead your customers, you serve them. You lead your employees, and then, yes, you sometimes make decisions that are necessary but not popular.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
If every website in the world would check the browser being used and if they were using a feature that IEx didn't support inserted a message: YOUR BROWSER DOESN'T SUPPORT SOME OF THE FEATURES OF THIS WEBSITE - SOME ITEMS MAY NOT DISPLAY CORRECTLY then Microsoft would get the word. Until then, MS has successfully made this issue Everybody Else's Problem.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I liked SVG, back in 2004/05 I wrote an interactive map application using SVG and what's now known as AJAX in IE5.
I read that Adobe was on the standards commitee for SVG, and piled tons of unneeded crap into the spec to try and make it a 'Flash Killer', but once they aquired Macromedia they stopped caring... and they were the only one that did.
There may never be a full implementation of the SVG spec, it's just too cumbersome, and outdated at this point.
>But Internet Explorer's lack of built-in support for SVG was keeping it away from mainstream use on the web.
Yeah, IE is a marginal browser used by few.
Even supporting IE at all means withholding features. That can make sense for supporting IE 7/8, which hold about 40% of the browser market.
IE6 only holds about 15% of the browser market, and requires extreme measures to support. If Google, a 150 billion dollar corporation, can't be bothered to support it in something as simple as a webmail client or video portal, why should the little guy struggle to support it in a complex web app?
I was actually just about to start porting an SVG applet I wrote to IE, and was not looking forward to it. After about 10 minutes of fiddling with this google project I got it up and running in IE! Google probably saved me at least a few days of work this week, and probably quite a bit more in the future! Thank you google!
But it's IE, and JavaScript is slow in IE!
I am not devoid of humor.
But webapps with lots of javascript have more to worry about than just looking a bit funky.
Flash is more or less usable for me on one machine since the release of fb 10b for amd64. But when I went from Windows XP to Linux (tried several) on my poor little Aspire One with an Atom processor, flash went from mostly pretty good to barely usable. Most other things are at least in the ballpark, if not better (useful boot time is much better, for one.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I applaud Google's efforts to bring us all toward standards-compliance, but hope this tweak will be brought to MS Office rather than stopping at MSIE.
Most companies have vector graphics of their logos for printing company swag, yet their email signatures still use image-based logos that add hundreds of kilobytes to the simplest one-line correspondence.
So long as big boss wants email signatures that look like business cards and IT guys want uniform installations of Windows+IE+Office any move toward standards-compliance which Microsoft will embrace is a godsend.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
16 million visits a day...man, all you had to do is flash an occasional link to your site, what, 1 in a 1000 times? Man oh man...
This is my sig.