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Comment by jahewson | Hacker News Reader

Nobody has mentioned the abandonment of SVG 1.2 as a factor. It was dropped by the W3C and never implemented in any browsers. This not only stalled improvements to SVG 1.1 but created a situation where the editing software (e.g. Inkscape) allows the user to create files using SVG 1.2 features which are invalid in SVG 1.1.

The abandonment has resulted in much-needed improvements to SVG being delayed. The last full release of SVG was 1.1 which was in 2003, we won't see another full release until SVG 2 which is expected in 2014, over a decade later!

Never mind the fact the browser implementations of SVG are still riddled with bugs and none are complete.

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Isn't that also because rendering SVG on screen is way, way slower than using PNG or JPG images? There was a comparison done half a year ago between the same page full of icons rendered using PNG vs SVG and the SVG version was sluggish as hell. And that was on desktop, you can only imagine how worse would the performance be on mobile devices...

Hmm... on a completely unrelated note, I may have just figured out how to convince the world that 5GHz processors and oodles of RAM are necessary in phones, thus keeping them on that upgrade treadmill...

And why we need double retina screen resolutions to tell the difference between vector and bitmap graphics on a 4 inch screen.

I imagine that is mostly due to the lack of attention to the format. PDFs with vector graphics work very well both in my desktop computer and mobile phone. The iPhone can even preview Adobe Illustrator files very well. Granted, it could cache the renderization since the image is not dynamic as a webpage.

By the way, are vector files hardware accelerated on mobile devices, usually ?

Was this test with openvg?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVG

> we won't see another full release until SVG 2 which is expected in 2014, over a decade later!

HTML4: 1998

HTML5: 2014

Doesnt really compare

HTML5 has been rolling out since 2004

It's from recommendation to recommendation.

The big difference is HTML was in widespread use already in 1998. Delaying the next version update when your standard isn't very popular is not a recipe for success.

More like:

HTML4: 1998

XHTML: 2000

HTML5: 2014

Also, I blame IE 6.

Yep, this right here. I'm working on a project involving SVG right now, and support is legitimately terrible in about 50 different ways.

I'm looking to cook up a PoC on SVG rendering on Mobile devices. Any insights and/or information on the issues that you've faced would be super helpful

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