RE: [whatwg] Exploring new vocabularies for HTML

 
On Sat 3/29/2008 3:49 PM Ian Hixson wrote

>I haven't looked in detail at the vector graphics side of the problem yet.
Off-hand it looks like SVG would be a reasonably good fit for some of the
requirements, in particular ease of implementation and a reasonably
well-defined scripting environment, but it also isn't a perfect fit for
everything, for example it probably isn't supported in as wide a
collection of editors as, say, the Windows Metafile format, and isn't
supported in as wide an installed base of browsers as, say, VML. I do not
wish to prematurely limit our options, doing so would not be fair to the
Web authoring community.

I don't think anybody is saying that HTML5 should disallow VML. Rather folks are saying, I think that HTML5 should allow SVG. It is the unique solution to certain web-based problems that many web application developers would like to solve. VML is a nice enough old technology, but it just isn't powerful enough to do what some of us need to do. The proprietary solutions don't work well either for those of us who don't want to demand a cover charge for people to sit at our tables and have meaningful conversations. I don't know of anything other than IE that runs VML, and does IE run in cell phones or other mobile devices? SVG does (300 million cell phones are SVG enabled, last I heard), so that the installed base of browsers is only one fraction (albeit an important one) of the web community.
 
David

Received on Sunday, 30 March 2008 11:49:00 UTC