
Secret Origin of SVG - mxfh
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/WG/wiki/Secret_Origin_of_SVG
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simonh
It's interesting how Microsoft have been very influential on web standards and
development in some key ways. Web Outlook as the first AJAX application, and
here in the early history of SVG. Yet never managed to turn that into actual
technological or market leading success.

The best I can make of it is that they do have some wickedly clever engineers
in there, but appalling management. While web outlook was redefining web
application development practices, Hotmail was devolving into a decaying has-
been of a service. Where it looks like VML could have become a key web
technology, giving Microsoft a market leading position in browser support and
authoring tools, instead it became a proprietary ghetto product and they were
one of the last browser makers to grudgingly support the new open standard.

Great technology. Incompetent leadership.

~~~
ArbitraryLimits
The reason Hotmail has stagnated under Microsoft is because of the
programmers, not the management. Since there aren't any interesting technical
problems in it, none of the hot shot programmers want to work on it. I'm
positive that inside Microsoft the view is that Hotmail is something a
clueless manager saddled some unlucky programmers with.

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jasonkester
This gives an idea of the frustration of watching the w3 in the 1990s and the
way they behaved at the time.

Microsoft: Here's a working, fully implemented and debugged, format for doing
vector graphics in a browser. How about we standardize on that?

W3C: Cool, we'll take a look at it... [overthink overthink overthink] ... OK,
here's our brand new, "Standardized" way of doing vector graphics in a
browser, which nobody has tried to implement and only somewhat overlaps with
IE's working reference implementation.

Microsoft-hating-developers (which was understandably most of them back then):
Grr!!! Microsoft, you've broken the STANDARDS again!!! M$ Sucks!

I remember this exact cycle repeating itself a half dozen times in the 90s,
and it took a lot of the fun out of trying to build web apps that worked cross
browser.

~~~
jerf
Nobody has tried to implement, only somewhat overlaps existing
implementations, and probably contains some nontrivial set of computationally
expensive or infeasible standards. (See quincunx's comment elsewhere in this
discussion, for example.) Then people online complain how long it takes the
browser makers to implement full compliance to, say, the latest CSS spec.

In general, the W3C has worked better than just letting random groups run
rampant, but I am coming around to preferring the style where we don't call it
a standard until there are at least two implementations already.

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monsterix
Am I the only one who believes that SVG is going to eat up the world in next
couple of years? Quite a few applications/start-ups focusing on it lately!

~~~
quincunx
From reading the spec, the problem with SVG is that it is very difficult to
implement completely due to the all-encompassing rendering model, javascript
integration and animation scripting. This makes it difficult to read and
write, without pulling in half a browser, and next to impossible to edit
fully, unless using a text editor.

So if we do see more adoptions, it's quite likely they'll either end up
incompatible with each other or some consensus on a work-able subset of SVG is
reached.

Perhaps if W3C had done a reference implementation much like, say, H.264 has
reference implementations, some of this could have been avoided?

I'd enjoy reading opposing views on this, interesting topic.

~~~
indypb
<http://www.w3.org/Amaya/> is a kind of reference browser from the W3C. The
release history lists the first SVG support in Amaya 4.0 from 10 November,
2000.

~~~
jarek-foksa
Amaya does not render correctly the most basic SVG files. Even IE6 would make
a better reference implementation of web standards.

Batik seems to be the most well-tested and conformant implementation of SVG at
the moment: <http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/status.html>, though I would
use WebKit as reference because of it's market share and potential of Google
and Apple to change the SVG spec.

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rogerallen
Why oh why did they not come out with a SVG 1.0 that was static and simple to
implement. A resolution independent replacement for images.

Sigh, what might've happened...

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culshaw
Totally expected this to be funded by DARPA

