Some years ago I had high hopes that SVG might one day become a practical means for rich interactivity in thin clients, similar to the way Flash has been used. Without good native support in web browsers, and spotty plug-in performance, the adoption of SVG has been lousy.

And it is about to get lousier, according to Kurt Cagle. His post is rather lengthy, so here are some high-lights:

“I’ve had to step down from chairing the SVG Open 2006 conference, a decision which, combined with other issues that the conference has had, led to the mutual decision by the SVG Open board to cancel the conference this year …

Adobe this week made an announcement that was, while not unexpected, yet another blow - they were choosing to stop supporting the Adobe SVG Viewer in any fashion, to make it unable for download by the end of the year…”

So is SVG dead? After a litany of reasons why SVG has been stymied, Cagle still thinks there is hope:

“Yet for all of this, I am not ready to pronounce the SVG standard dead yet, not in the face of so much evidence to the contrary. Opera’s efforts in this regard are notable - with a native SVG implementation already in their 9.0 browser, Opera has basically done something truly necessary to the survival of the standard - it has created a native implementation within the browser, rather than forcing users to go the route of plugins. SVG is also finding its way to the Apple Safari desktop (and like all that Apple does, will likely be fast, efficient and really sexy). I believe that with SVG on Opera, this will likely be a burr in the saddle to Firefox to get their own implementation of SVG completed, which only leaves Microsoft …”

SVG may not be dead, but it is suffering mightily on life support.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 18:25 and is filed under syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.