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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."
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Funny, funny.
I'm sure their help will be just like that they gave to the development of OpenGL.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I don't really know how the W3C is organized, but shouldn't there be some protection against allowing organizations who are openly hostile toward a technology from sitting on the committee? Isn't this just common sense?
Who do they think they are? The UN?
-Peter
So basically you tried to shove your own proprietary format (XAML?) down our throats but that didn't work. So you thought you'd wait it out and see who had the biggest cajones in this game of chicken where people had to pick? But then Google and Adobe just made plugins for IE that made SVG work which kind of let the air out of your tires. And now, before you've even implemented the SVG Tiny spec in Internet Explorer you are saying things like 'We recognize that vector graphics are an important component of the next-generation Web platform'? So where would that leave IE since it has not implemented said important component of next-generation web platforms?
So you basically want a say in which direction the spec takes from now on without having proven to anyone that you are truly committed to this?
Or is this some hilarious attempt to sidle in at the last moment and hope everyone forgets about your blatant disregard for SVG and make it seem like SVG had always been in your plans but you're only now just getting around to it?
I mean, you're looking mighty foolish now no matter which route you take.
All that angst and animosity aside, I applaud this action. Get it implemented in IE right now so I can start writing crap that utilizes basic graphics without having to post an unnecessarily large image for a flow chart and we can start to carve down the Flash usage out there.
My work here is dung.
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?
We recognize that vector graphics are an important component of the next generation Web platform. As evidenced by our ongoing involvement in W3C working groups, we are committed to participating in the standards process to subvert those standards to our benefit. Our involvement with the SVG working group builds on that commitment.
Fixed that for you.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Title says it all. We've seen this before, folks.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Silverlight didn't work, and we still want to kill Flash.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
First sentence of TFA:
As a part of Microsoft's continued commitment to interoperability and standards support...
Uh, when did that happen? I have yet to see M$ ever work toward either of those goals.
SVG adoption needs Microsoft to gain critical mass. 66.43% SVG figure is based on December StatOwl.com figures.
Here we go again: http://noooxml.wikidot.com
"Committee stuffing is a standard practice for Microsoft. Microsoft raped ISO with their office file formats, leaving the organization in limbo. The whole campaign against the format have raised an army of people, which are furious about the dirty tactics used by Microsoft to get the broken standard through ISO. This anger won't go away, and I wish good luck to Microsoft to get it adopted by governments. The reputation of Microsoft went down below zero with this process."
You just know that Microsoft will try to stick in some way to embed executable code, so SVG files can invoke "platform specific services".
Besides, without that, it won't be useful for viruses and trojans.
"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.
Embrace <-- you are here
Extend
Extinguish
Until Microsoft commits to supporting SVG in IE it is hard to see Microsoft's supposed support of the standard as anything but disingenuous.
Well we certainly have a right to be cynical, given past events, but odd things happen. For example Sony has started supporting SD!?
One question though, is there any BSD styled SVG implementation that could be grafted onto a browser?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
As soon as Microsoft implements the current SVG standards in IE, they should be welcomed into the process of refining the standards further.
Until they implement the current SVG standards, they should be kept away.
[Opinions mine, not IBM's.]
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Based on this growth trend, I'd say Silverlight has a future still.
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.
Consider using modifiers to your advantage.
I often find "Offtopic", "Overrated" and "Flamebait" to be more like "I don't like it". "Troll" is often funnier than "Funny". "Redundant" is usually OK but rarely used. So I am using a positive modifier to almost everything (except anonymous postings) and moderation now serves me to mark postings which were compelling enough for someone to moderate them.
We wiwl pwetend to be fwends wif him - then sneak up on the widdow fellah and bwast 'im!!!
Cawfuw - don't let anybody know!!!
*** Don't be dull.***
While I use Inkscape myself the designers I knew used Adobe Illustrator for vector work. And boy was some of their stuff good - what they could with that Bezier spline tool beggared belief. One guy's Illustrator portrait of his girlfriend looked like it was painted...
All the browsers except one (go ahead, guess which one) are becoming capable enough to do a lot of animation and tricks that people used to put in flash, themselves.
Flash itself is hated because it ruins the web, it locks up data in an executable that can't be indexed.
And then, MS comes along and rather then improve its browser to support standards, it adds a flash copy. Who needs it? Do we REALLY want to go back to the days of the web bubble where you had a dozen plugins begging to be installed? Bad enough that flash survived, we don't need a new one.
It also ruins the browser experience for those who have trouble with sight. The rest of the web can be spoken or enlarged or contrast changed (not IE) but that doesn't work for plugins.
The only use I seen for silverlight is to embed video. Why introduce yet another closed source player when it would have been trivial for MS to just support the video tag.
Make no mistake, silverlight is nothing more then activex 2.0. Yet another attempt by MS to turn the browser into a windows only experience.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
support XHTML as an XML instance rather than as an HTML extension of an SGML instance. Then at last, I won't have to have a fix for <textarea /> , <div />, <script /> problems that arise after normalising XHTML documents.
More likely you'll just end up staring at "xml parsing error, mismatched tag" all day long. Honestly, why people ever started backing a way of working that completely breaks down with even the smallest vagueness in what crosses the wire is beyond me. Good design is liberal in what it accepts and strict in what it puts out. Generating valid XHTML but parsing it as tag soup, that's the right way to go about things.
Section 1.2.5.3.2.8.200.1
Entity SILVERLIGHT_30034509, type STREAM
Contains an open, standard set of Silverlight objects for interpretation.
Entity SILVERLIGHT_FIXERUPPER, type BOOLEAN
To work around bugs in Silverlight.
We recognize that vector graphics are an important component of the next-generation Web platform.
Translation: Since the overwhelming majority of vendors is on board with it, we don't want to be left out in the cold
Do you hate Silverlight because it's Microsoft
It's reason enough.
After observing a few decades anticompetitive behavior, punctuated with six years during which they utterly and completely neglected Internet Explorer -- the world's primary window to the web -- two things seem pretty apparent to me:
1) Despite all their talk about developers, developers, developers, when they can get away with it, they care about developers not one bit. If they did, some minimal effort towards fixing some of the more egregious problems with IE might have been made, instead of pushing the problems out onto the backs of hundreds of thousands of web authors who had to figure out how to circumvent bugs and irregularities.
2) It's quite likely they'd like pull an embrace-extend-extinguish with the web as whole if they can pull it off. And if they get critical mass for RIAs with Silverlight, they might even be able to pull it off. I don't care how good Silverlight is -- and I've been impressed with some things -- I'm not at all interested in that future.
Tweet, tweet.