Whither SVG?

September 17, 2003

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is, to my mind, an obviously great thing—an industry standard, XML-based language for rendering vector graphics, animation, and user interfaces. Yet it continues to languish. Despite a lot of push from the W3C and a cadre of interested vendors (led by Adobe but absent, notably, Microsoft to date), SVG still does not have a great deal of traction.

The surest sign that SVG is lagging is that there are still more books about SVG than related job postings on monster.com. This is an unscientific measure to be sure, but a telling one. I test this measure on several technologies semi-regularly. As of today, amazon.com was selling nine books on SVG (plus an instructional CD and an eBook), while monster.com listed seven jobs that mentioned SVG (and none of them all that prominently). As a co-author of one of these nine books, I have to hope that the seven people who get these SVG jobs plan to buy a lot of books.

Apart from my selfish interest, though, I would like to see SVG gain more ground. Is it simply a matter of Microsoft weighing in with deeper support for SVG? Is Flash and its family of products simply too entrenched? I think these factors play a part, but perhaps more significant is a continued lack of focus on an improved experience for the end user. SVG is one of many technologies that could improve the end user experience. When will client development benefit from more attention to the graphical user interface?

Posted by Bill Trippe at September 17, 2003 9:32 AM

Comments

FYI, the next release of the Linux desktop KDE (3.2) will have SVG support built in. This includes SVG support in the web browser, Konqueror.

I suspect that Microsoft will treat SVG with the same disdain as they treated PNG.

Posted by Richard Jones at September 17, 2003 5:43 PM

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