Re: SVG and MathML in text/html

Hi, Henri-

Henri Sivonen wrote (on 3/10/08 4:51 PM):
> 
> Pure technology value is a characteristic of a given technology without 
> regard to how it interacts with other stuff. For example, the number of 
> polygons a game console can shade per second is a characteristic of the 
> game console that doesn't depend of external factors. A game console 
> becomes more valuable when there are more games available for it and 
> more games become available as there are more console units sold. A game 
> console with higher shader throughput but no games is of no value 
> compared to a less performant console that has a lot of games available 
> for it. When a new console with almost no games is launched, it is less 
> valuable than a console from the previous generation with a lot of 
> games. A smart strategist creates the new console to leverage the 
> network effects of the existing ecosystem by making the new console 
> compatible with the games of the previous generation.
> 
> XHTML totally failed to use the well-known strategy of leveraging the 
> existing network effects by being compatible with the installed base of 
> the previous technology generation.

I strongly agree with you here.  I think that that was a serious failing 
of the deployment of XHTML.

I also want to emphasize, however, that the same situation obtains in 
reverse here.  SVG already has a wide deployment base on mobiles, and in 
legacy viewers, that demands strict content (with the odd exception in 
the case of namespace declaration in Adobe's viewer).  The network 
effect would be critically lessened if an incompatible serialization of 
SVG were deployed, as I said before.

Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG, CDF, and WebAPI

Received on Tuesday, 11 March 2008 09:16:52 UTC