Re: "mouse or rat"

> When I try to view using Opera I'm asked if I want to download !home.svg
> If I choose to open this file IE is started (much to my annoyance) and 

You need Mozilla or Amaya to be reasonably up to date in this respect.
If Opera doesn't support SVG it has a serious hole in its image support,
as SVG is the only vector image standard from W3C.  It may be possible
to convince Opera to support it, although with development of IE stalled and
Flash available from Windows Update, I don't think it likely that there
will be mainstream support in the near future, and the Opera people may
be more interested in tracking IE than giving broad standards support.

(That you get redirected to IE may be because of the use of ActiveX
references; these tend to be the only way of getting IE to work well
with plugin solutions.)

> I'm asked to install a plug in. Is this the type of behaviour that you 
> expected Jonathan?

Whilst I haven't looked at this page, and suspect that I would find it
difficult to understand if I did (past examples, using HTML, have been),
the level of graphics and animation that Jonathon believes his audience
requires is not appropriate for HTML, and, whilst I would rather there
were built-in support for static SVG images in IE, rather than the
current situation with SVG trying to take over the world (replace Flash,
HTML,.....) but with only a small proportion of web users having
access to it, SVG is the most appropriate W3C technology to achieve the
sort of user interface that he wants, without using special purpose
client side executables.

Incidentally, a design goal of SVG (although I doubt most users 
achieve them) is that you should be able to strip all the tags and
leave meaningful text.  Opera should probably be displaying it as
plain text, if it doesn't know how to handle it, but I suspect
that it looks like ActiveX because of what is needed to ensure 
downloading on IE, and that is why it is being handed off to IE.

(My suspicion is that IE doesn't support it because they distribute
Flash which covers the marketing niche and because they would rather
people use Windows metafile diagrams in Word for technical documents,
so that they can sell more copies of MS Office.)

Received on Sunday, 23 November 2003 09:34:47 UTC