Re: no-namespace href in SVG

On Oct 11, 2007, at 2:48 PM, Doug Schepers wrote:

> Hi, Maciej-
>
> Maciej Stachowiak wrote (on 10/11/2007 5:07 PM):
>> On Oct 11, 2007, at 9:09 AM, Doug Schepers wrote:
>>> It would still be backwards-incompatible.  New content (that only  
>>> used 'null:href') would not work in SVG1.1 UAs.  Right now, the  
>>> most popular and functional plugin (ASV) for the most popular  
>>> browser (IE) is no longer being updated, so the largest user base  
>>> would not be able to use links in new SVG content.
>> Are there actually more users of ASV than of SVG-capable versions  
>> of Safari, Opera and Firefox (which are actively being updated)? I  
>> honestly don't know the answer but I expect ASV's market share is  
>> much smaller than IE's total, and it's unclear if its adoption rate  
>> is greater than that of natively SVG-capable browsers.
>
> I don't know the answer either, and my expectation is that it is  
> dropping, proportionally, as time goes by.  If I had some way to  
> gauge that, I'd be very interested to do so.  Possibly we could find  
> the sites that have the most hits for "SVG", and ask them to donate  
> their logs; I suspect Adobe has some good records there. ;)
>
> There are still a lot of ASV users out there, partly because Adobe  
> aggressively deployed it, and partly because, frankly, it has been  
> the most performant and richly featured SVG viewer.

I would guess Firefox 2 alone has orders of magnitude more market  
share than ASV. This survey shows it at ~13% use share: <http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=6 
 >. I would be surprised if ASV has even a tenth this much penetration  
of browser users, but it's hard to tell since plugins are not  
reflected in the UA string. Data from SVG-oriented sites would  
probably  be disproportionately biased to users who are aware of and  
care about SVG, so I'm not sure it is a useful metric.

> Opera is very rapidly catching up in performance (if it hasn't  
> already caught up), and has passed it in lots of very cool features  
> (especially in Opera 9.5)... they are kicking serious ass.  Both  
> Firefox and Safari are showing rapid improvement in both categories  
> as well, though both still lack declarative animation and SVG fonts  
> (IIRC).

Results that I have seen show Safari 3 to be the fastest  
implementation for many cases, particularly dynamic script-driven  
scenarios. For instance <http://data.xeoh.net/svg.benchmark/> (note  
that higher numbers are better on this benchmark), <http://www.ajaxperformance.com/?p=58 
 >, <http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2007-April/001772.html 
 >.

I'd agree that Opera's implementation is more complete in most areas.

> I don't know if native SVG support in the other browsers will put  
> significant market pressure on IE to implement SVG, but it may.  At  
> that point, with active development on all major browsers, there  
> will be breathing room to consider enhancements like this.

I'm not sure why that would have to be a blocker, we should not hold  
back solely because of a low and shriking market share abandoned  
implementation.

Currently it seems like libraries for structured vector graphics on  
the web tend to use SVG in browsers with native support and VML in IE,  
regardless of whether ASV is available. Hard to tell what the long- 
term story for IE is.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Thursday, 11 October 2007 23:02:20 UTC