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July 25, 2005
Native SVG Support in IE8
Native SVG Support in IE8: I'm taking a vacation day today, but wanted to highlight this post from Rick Bulotta to the SVG-Dev mailing list -- he asks which members would want to work towards having the upcoming Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 browser be able to render files written in the SVG-Tiny 1.1 format (see related specs). I'm not sure about lobbying MS, but Rick also puts in another way: "Even cooler would be for the SVG community to donate the implementation code..." I think this is possible, browsermaker's consent or not, by rendering SVG-T 1.1 in SWF. Better yet, if you hold these rendering instructions in a SWF document like this, then they're easy to update or modify in a way that downloaded plugins are not. Such work hasn't risen to the top of any formal group's priorities, but I think this is task would more appropriately be performed by volunteer opensource development anyway. Claus's multi-spec renderer DENG is already described up on OSFlash.org... it would be great to have a small skin SWF which can be pointed at different SVGT1.1-compliant files, along with sample OBJECT/EMBED tags for easy use... the goal would be to treat SVG-Tiny 1.1 files as just another media type in the browser, to make it as simple for authors as .GIF or .MP3. (Disclaimers: Yeah, I should do it myself, but week after week I know I wouldn't do it, so I'm reduced to lobbying. My incentive? I already type too much about the differences between SWF & SVG, so it would be great to just show the differences instead. No, I have zero idea how this interacts with the whole Adobe deal... I've just wanted to see this for awhile, and Rick's post galvanized me.) Do you think that easy-to-author SVG-Tiny 1.1 rendering would be a desirable task for the OSFlash group? If not, then do you have any other leads on aligning incentives and resources to bring such a thing about...?
Posted by John Dowdell at July 25, 2005 09:23 AM
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Comments
Did you mean IE7? At the current pace, IE8 should be out sometime in 2015.
Posted by: Dan at July 25, 2005 10:24 AM
Even cooler might be little plug-in that can compile SVG into SWF as part of the author/browser/server. Would sure be faster than something that renders the SVG in flash each time it is encountered.
And turning SVG into another way to author Flash would be a nice little coup for Flash.
Anyway, have a good vacation JD, I'll miss your news, even if it is just a day,
Alex.
Posted by: Alexander McCabe at July 25, 2005 11:01 AM
What about being able to pass in SVG content to a Flash object? send to browser separately, send in as a param or something
Posted by: David at July 25, 2005 12:45 PM
I'm not sure what you intend by the phrase "Flash object", but here's what I was thinking:
1) Take any standard, compliant SVG-Tiny 1.1 file as a standalone .xml on the server.
2) Have a .htm which invokes Macromedia Flash Player via OBJECT & EMBED tags, which also passes the location of the .svg file to the Player.
3) The .swf which is loaded parses the input params from the OBJECT/EMBED, asks the browser for that .svg file, reads it and turns it into Flash's drawing API, which then displays it on screen.
Result: Standalone .svg file, referenced within the OBJECT & EMBED .htm tags, calling up a SWF to retrieve and display that SVGT1.1 file.
We seeing the same thing here...?
jd/mm
Posted by: John Dowdell at July 25, 2005 07:15 PM