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Microsoft Wants To Participate In SVG Development
rossendryv writes "After many years of fighting against the standard, Microsoft announced they are joining the WC3's SVG working group to help with the development of SVG. 'We recognize that vector graphics are an important component of the next-generation Web platform,' said Patrick Dengler, senior program manager on Microsoft's Internet Explorer team in a blog post."
What do you developers prefer as a development environment? I personally use Inkscape, an open source Vector graphics editor. What does Slashdot like to use?
Microsoft is a big monolithic company; they don't move quickly. If they put SVG in IE9 everyone will benifit. I think this will lead to good things for SVG.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
They are now more efficient at subverting. Remember those "embrace, extend, extinguish"? They didn't implement SVG in IE, so they are going straight to extend!
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
I'm amazed it took 8 whole minutes of comments for someone to utter this, and more amazed the article wasn't already tagged as such. I really hope they don't put too much of a dent in things; I'm rather fond of SVG.
"Two Fingerz Ronnie" and he calls you into the back of the place, so he can slip you a shiv between da ribs an' he don' have to walk as far to dispose of da body in the alley 'round back.
I'd trust MS about as much as I'd trust "Two Fingerz."
They like to embrace, extend, fuck you up, go back on standards, steal your technology and leave you bleeding in a back alley. (Remember J-Script? Not JavaScript, J-Script. They couldn't call it JavaScript. But they tried.)
MS has NEVER played straight with ANYBODY.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Based on this growth trend, I'd say Silverlight has a future still.
Not necessarily, if he means Silverlight (as it uses XAML as the markup 'code')
Which is the sole reason I dont use NetFlix. Or watch videos on Microsoft's site.
I've seen this response many times, yet I have never seen a reasonable explanation for the boycott. Do you hate Silverlight because it's Microsoft or is there something wrong with the technology that has made you stay away?
I have limited exposure to the Bing Video site, but with that limited exposure, I have had nothing but positive experiences. I've experienced no problem streaming HD content, for example. YouTube, on the other hand, struggled badly to stream 720P content through my FiOS connection running at 25 Mb/sec (both up and down).
From an architectural / security standpoint, Silverlight runs in a Sandbox, among other things, which greatly improve security (this most certainly isn't another Active X). Additionally, as a developer, I feel that C# is a better language than AS 3. I don't know any designers that have worked in Expression Blend, so I can't comment on their vantage point. I welcome their comments, however.
My lame blog.
That's probably part of it, but I wonder if the fact that Microsoft is trying to play in the tablet space -- where reading ebooks is a key application -- and SVG support is required for conformant .epub readers (with .epub is increasingly dominant for ebooks) might be a factor.
And further fragment the current vorbis-H.264 slugfest? If Microsoft doesn't want HTML5 to succeed, they can just not implement it. Introducing yet another codec would be even dumber than Silverlight, since Silverlight fills a niche (studios want DRM.) Unless they decide to hack DRM into <video>, but I really find that unlikely.
By making inflammatory statements that you can't be reasonably assumed to actually believe. (Please note that your intent doesn't matter. If you're just crazy, the post is still a troll.)
A beautiful case in point. I've done nothing to make you feel so persecuted. So, either you're a nut job with a persecution complex, or your playing hurt as part of a troll. Make sense?
Of course the answer to your ridiculous question is no.
You understand that Slashdot hasn't had "moderators" in the sense you seem to be using for over a decade, right? I'm a moderator right now. You could be two in just two simple steps. 1. Log in. 2. Contribute. Good luck!
I don't understand why you hold your ignorance up as evidence. I encourage you to do a little research and discover the history of Microsoft's relationship with SVG to date. And its history with standards bodies. I'm sure it will shed light on my comments.
Can you tell me a better predictor of of a person or an organizations behavior than the history of his or its behavior?
I am a fan of technological progress. I've used SVG to good effect. Open standards have universally proven beneficial to society.
I am perfectly indifferent to the success or failure of Microsoft. But I'm very much against allowing Microsoft to torpedo a useful standard like SVG. I am a stanch capitalist, and I encourage microsoft to compete in the marketplace. But that doesn't mean I have to accept their track record of dirty tricks that ultimately retard progress.
It would certainly benefit SVG if Microsoft sincerely supported it. And if they wanted to do that, they have but to implement it in their browser.
But, they refuse this, while seeking to sit on the working group. If that isn't suspicious to you, then you are paranoid and gullible in a way that I would have thought impossible.
Yes, Slashdot is a horrible place full of meanies. And yet, here you are. Yet another example of you ostensibly taking a position, but clearly having contradicting underlying motives.
-Peter
Since silverlight supports H.264, they will probably include Silverlight in the next Ie, and simple have transparent support to their tags, and extend the DOM as needed. Honestly don't expect more from MS considering how poorly integrated the JS engine (COM Based) is by today's standards.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Silverlight supports Accessibility APIs natively. It also works on Mac and Linux (through Moonlight). It can also be easily scaled if, for example, hosted in a DIV with relative size (and, optionally, positioning).
Well, in addition to those reasons, perhaps they want to figure out how best to easily support doing vector graphics from the programming tricks they can learn from others involved with SVG.
It wouldn't be the first time they borrowed code from elsewhere to try to improve their own product...
For instance... Intuit/(Money?), Stac Electronics for disk compression, the BSD stack (which they somehow managed to mangle the use of), much of Stardock's window dressing for XP (and all later versions of Windows), and too many others to list here.
I'm sure they'd be thrilled if they could both (a) make this a learning experience for themselves, and (b) ruin the standard (and thus the competition) in the process.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Well, let me help you seeing that problem then. I'm using SUSE Linux 64bit and 64bit Chrome to browse the web. There's a wrapper to use the 32-bit Flash plugin and the latest Flash (which is on par with the Windows version) works without problem for me. You're right Adobe is not really playing nice with 64bit Linux, but in practice there's little problem.
On the other hand, SUSE is probably the best supported Linux distribution for Moonlight, yet Moonlight lags so much behind that there is more Silverlight content that doesn't work than content that does. That is very real practical problem for me. I know I'm a minority being a Linux user, but for me this is a clear reason to hate Silverlight.
If Microsoft would release a Silverlight version themselves for Linux, that would be on par with the Windows version, I would complain a lot less.
Finally, I agree Flash is also an evil, as is Silverlight. But I can live with such an "evil" if it solves practical problems for me. Flash however is already all around, and Silverlight fortunately isn't yet, and two evils are certainly worse than one.