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Microsoft Adopts SVG For Internet Explorer 9
An anonymous reader writes "SVG has been a published standard for almost a decade. Microsoft has had nothing to do with it, even while every other major browser adopted SVG as a supported format and interface. Just in the last few weeks, though, Microsoft has thrown a surprising amount of its weight behind SVG." This means for IE 9, but it's a start.
So much fucking FUD, people.
Windows XP (Server 2003/R2 is still mainstream, but they won't port IE9 to it becaus of the same reasons like they did with 2000 and IE 7), is in extended support, which means no more new features, just security updates until 2014.
Now, if you'd like those features, Microsoft has a program in which you pay the devs extra to port it to (insert older Windows OS here).
IE 9 will run on Vista and 7.
I've tested with an application that I'm developing that generates complex SVG network maps (that validate as SVG 1.1 with the W3C validator with no errors).
Linear gradients don't work at all, stroke and fill colors appear to be sporadic. JavaScript doesn't work (but I didn't expect it to as it's targeted to Chrome and Safari primarily right now).
I expect that MS will add more functionality as the preview progresses. They have a lot of work to do, regardless.
1) There is not, and never has been, an Ubuntu version 1.0.
2) I don't know how old you are. If you are old enough, you may recall a period in human (and computing) history referred to as "the Nineties." It was a rough-and-tumble era in which browsers fought and bled and died, when this whole newfangled "dot com" thing happened and people all around the globe started using all kinds of intertubes-type stuff. Windows XP, by the way, was not around back then.
Granted, it was not discovered that the Internet was, in fact, a series of tubes until the eminent Ted Stevens presented his groundbreaking research in the mid-2000s, but the tubes were already in heavy operation by then.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
And with all that said, perhaps it's time to put Microsoft's SVG implementation through the /. torture rack.
Not necessary - here is a nice comparision for all current browser implementations of SVG and how much tests of the official SVG test suite they pass : SVG Implementation Table. If you click on the chart you get a very detailed view.
To summarize:
IE9: 29% of the SVG test cases,
Firefox: 72%,
Chrome/Safari: 83
Opera: 93%
IE9 is way behind, Opera is the winner in this test
I've said this before, and I'll say it again.
Silverlight was not released just to watch movies and animations. Just because that's what Flash has devolved into over the years, doesn't mean that that's what Microsoft(or anyone else) wants to do with Silverlight(or JavaFX if it still exists).
Silverlight is aimed at creating Rich Internet Applications. It's more of an alternative to AJAX than to Flash because, while Flash can be used to create RIAs, no one does.
Unfortunately, the demo RIA for everyone of these platforms is a video player, mostly because it's dead simple, looks flashy and is something you can't do in Javascript, so everyone forgets that.
I really don't think that HTML5 and/or SVG taking over the animation or video playing market share is going to make any dent in Silverlight, because that's not what it was designed for.