Microsoft's commitment to SVG?

Does anyone know if Microsoft is developing a SVG
viewer for Internet Explorer, or will at least bundle 
a third party viewer such as the one from Adobe?

Now that Netscape's air supply has been cut off,
Microsoft's commitment to SVG is sort of important.
If they don't bundle a SVG viewer with IE then 
users will have to download third party viewers over
slow modems. This could set SVG back 3 to 5 years,
until broadband becomes commonplace, eliminating
Microsoft's distribution advantage.

I know Microsoft is one of the authors of the 
SVG spec, but then Microsoft is also a member of 
the OMG, so we know that that doesn't mean a whole
lot. (I suspect Microsoft employees are on the SVG 
working group for the same reason CIA has people 
working in Moscow.)

I hear Microsoft is working on VML 2.0, which copies
SVG features, such as transformation matrices.

Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to promote their own 
competing proprietary standard, VML as in this recent 
article on MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/0300/sql/sql.asp

I think Microsoft is a great company and I am grateful
to them for bringing such basic innovations to this
industry as graphical user interfaces, ethernet,
object oriented programming, crash-proof operating
systems, scalable fonts, etc etc but if they don't
support SVG I am going to have to re-adjust my opinion

about them.

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Received on Sunday, 13 February 2000 01:54:39 UTC