UPDATE: More reasons added thanks to promising news
After putting some thought it in, I believe there’s a very good chance that IE9 will include native SVG support. Here’s my reasoning:
- The EU’s pressure on MS to support more standards in IE.
- There’s few other really stable specifications left unsupported in IE8.
- SVG Web library should increase SVG usage on web, more usage means more reason for MS to support it.
- With SVG Web around, any potential competition with Silverlight should be a non-issue.
- [September 19] Microsoft becomes a sponsor of SVG Open 2009. Several IE members are seen attending panels.
- [November 12] Microsoft sends their first email to the public SVG working group mailing list
What do you think?
6 replies on “Why IE9 will support SVG”
you were right, ie9 will support svg natively.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/03/18/svg-in-ie9-roadmap.aspx
All this is possible, but it would be interesting to have a look at IE9 as already said Jeff Schiller.
VML: better!
http://www.svg-vml.net/
VML: Wow!
http://www.svg-vml.net/
Well, EU pressure or not, you know they’ll want to support more standards in IE9. With CSS2.1 taken care of there being little interest in supporting the many HTML5 & CSS3 working draft features, what’s left? From my list:
CSS3 Media Queries – Will probably be supported, but not a huge feature
CSS3 Colors – Likely to be supported
CSS3 Selectors – Likely to be supported
MathML – Unlikely, certainly not before SVG
XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml – Unlikely, especially with HTML5 gaining popularity
SVG
Of course, that’s not to say they won’t support Working Draft features. A handful already are supported, and some of them are in Last Call.
But you’ve got to admit, with the increasing amount of requests from web designers so far, as well as specific mentions by Tim Berners-Lee and Håkon Wium Lie (Hey, he’s been getting his way so far), it would look really bad if they chose not to support it.
As for the level of support, I’d expect the first release to be quite minimal, perhaps only including what currently works in Gecko and Webkit. I’d consider us lucky if we’d get dynamic SVG, with little hope for Fonts, Filters or SMIL. Also no SVG-in-CSS, as much as I’d love it. As you can tell, this is the part where I lose my optimism. 🙂
And yes, based on the IE7-IE8 gap, IE9 will be released around August, 2011. More than enough time to support SVG, dammit!
I think it’s possible, but I don’t think the EU pressure will have the effect you’re hoping for.
And if they do, we haven’t heard word one about IE9 yet, so likely a release is years away.
Then there’s the question of how much will they support. I’m hoping it will be SVG 1.1 2nd edition (whenever that is released). At least up to dynamic SVG (DOM) and SMIL, if not the entire spec (including Fonts and Filters).
Anyway, I’m not holding my breath, I got tired of doing that. I’m just going to forge what I can with SVG Web 🙂