This article, Browsers Get Ready for Graphics Boost, claims that Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a W3C specification for XML based vector graphics (i.e. graphics composed out of vectors and arcs instead of pixels), will at long last be getting mainstream browser support.
Opera, who lead the market in browsers for handheld devices, plan to have native support in the forthcoming Opera 8. SVG is particularly significant in the handheld sector, where pixel based graphics formats such as JPEG and GIF are often unsuitable. Handheld devices have both limited bandwidth and small screens. A JPEG image which might appear quite small on a standard computer screen might be too large to fit completely on a handheld screen, and will often be a fairly hefty download, which becomes particularly significant if you are also paying for every single byte as many handheld users are. Vector graphics are scalable, and so can be rescaled to fit appropriately on small screens, and because they consist merely of statements like “draw a red circle with radius r and centre ⟨x,y⟩” they are much smaller than their pixmap equivalents. SVG is so important to the mobile sector that “the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project), a GSM network technical standards body, has begun mandating SVG support for next-generation mobile devices” and the W3C has tailored a specific “mobile profile” of the SVG specification.
Firefox will apparently also have SVG native support enabled with release 1.1. This is very cool indeed, because SVG isn’t just important for the mobile/handheld sector, but is a very exciting prospect for the web in general. Because SVG is just another XML application, it can be freely mixed and matched with XHTML using namespaces. By embedding XHTML in SVG and vice versa many things become possible: text inside graphics can be fully accessible to search engines; a whole document of mixed XHTML/SVG content can be scripted through the DOM and styled with CSS, so, for example, a particular part of a graph could glow or change colour when your mouse hovered over a piece of text referring to it, or the graph could change dynamically as you typed various “what-if?” values into a form.
Currently the only real way to do many of the things SVG is intended for is to use Flash. Now Flash has its place, and is certainly capable of many things which SVG isn’t and never will be. But Flash is also wholly unsuitable for the kinds of things it has been pressed into use for in order to fill the gap left by the lack of a viable alternative. SVG could be that viable alternative.
It is almost certain that Microsoft will not be providing support for SVG in the forthcoming Internet Explorer 7, just as they will not be supporting CSS 2 or 2.1. They simply don’t have time now given their intended release date for IE7 (some time this summer). But it is also unlikely that they will ever support those standards, given that Avalon actually includes competing, non-open, non-standard vector graphics and stylesheet languages. (Despite the fact that Microsoft are W3C members and helped to draft the SVG and CSS standards.)
Apple’s browser Safari is actually based on the KHTML rendering engine used in Konqueror, the KDE browser. KDE, like its competing GNU/Linux desktop environment GNOME, already makes heavy use of SVG, and it is surely only a matter of time before KHTML also has native support for SVG, and therefore only a matter of time before Safari does too.
In that case the situation will become really interesting: on one hand we will have native support for SVG in all mainstream browsers except IE, and a demand for SVG content driven by the mobile sector; on the other hand the dominant browser, IE, will not support such content and Microsoft will hold out for Avalon to hit the streets (which even if they release it before Longhorn is unlikely to be before 2006). Either Microsoft will leverage its market dominance to kill SVG in its infancy by refusing to support it, or users, already frustrated by IE’s security flaws and other problems, will switch to standards compliant browsers at an even greater rate than they already are, thereby undermining Avalon’s future.
Liberal Democrat 38
