Secret Origin of SVG | Hacker News Reader

Secret Origin of SVG

w3.org

42 pointsmxfh12 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

May I know which applications/start-ups do you mean? I'm working on a web-based SVG editor myself because I was unable to find such tool on the market. I can only think of SVG Edit which is unlikely to be ever usable considering how messy its code is.

Yes.

If it was going to take off in a big way it would have.

Would have been much better off if the spec was 10% the size and covered 95% of the use cases rather than the actual monstrosity which almost nothing fully implements correctly.

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...

Totally expected this to be funded by DARPA

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