Re: Interim strategies for no SMIL (and other?) support in IE9

I posted the following to the IE Team's IEBLOG:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# re: SVG in IE9 Roadmap
Tuesday, March 30, 2010 11:20 AM by Francis Hemsher

Now that Internet Explorer has embraced SVG, I think it is time to
look at IE8 users and their transition into IE9. This is a suggestion
that should make the process of viewing SVG seamless in both browser
versions.

The key is the <EMBED> element. This provides very solid svg viewing
in IE8 if the Adobe SVG Viewer ActiveX is installed in the user's
computer.

The <EMBED> call in IE9 could include a default flag that used the
Adobe ActiveX if it were available. This would then allow IE9 to view
the many 1000's of svg apps created by svg developers during the past
10 years.

Furthermore, in the best of SVG worlds, the Adobe ActiveX could be a
resident ActiveX in IE9.
---------------------------------------(end)----------------------------------------

The IE9 Roadmap does state that SVG will be available for the <embed>.

"In future updates, the IE9 Platform Preview will support:
Methods of embedding: <embed>, <iframe>, <img>, css image, .svgz"

If this suggestion is accepted, then those who also want to take
advantage of ASV's resident Animation, SMIL, and Filters could do so
in IE9.

Regards,
Francis

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 4:11 PM, Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org> wrote:
> Hi, folks-
>
> Just to clarify, when I said "more functional", I meant specifically for the
> following three features:
>
> 1) SVG Fonts: the full profile of SVG Fonts, i.e. SVG fonts with arbitrary
> content, rather than simple path syntax
>
> 2) Declarative Animation: ASV had fairly good (though not great) SMIL
> support; performance could have been better, but they had a fairly full
> feature set.  Firefox may have SMIL support, and there is interesting stuff
> going on with CSS animation as well.
>
> 3) Filters: ASV had fairly complete filter support, unsurprisingly, since
> many of the filter primitives come from Illustrator and Photoshop.  Firefox
> has made a lot of progress here, actually.
>
> I don't think IE9 will support any of these three, but it (and the other
> browsers) will do other things better than ASV did, like HTML integration
> and hardware acceleration; but these areas of improvement aren't the
> features at risk for legacy content, by definition.
>
> Note: Opera has fairly complete SVG support, so I'm less worried there;
> WebKit also has pretty good SVG support, though Android turns it off for
> now. :(
>
> So, the question remains... how to best manage the transition?
>
> Regards-
> -Doug Schepers
> W3C Team Contact, SVG and WebApps WGs
>
>
> ddailey wrote (on 4/26/10 2:27 PM):
>>
>> Doug suggested that I might want to raise this with the SVG Working
>> Group. I summarize my question since it was originally more verbose than
>> needed. Doug's reply follows.
>>
>> Given that IE/ASV has such strong SVG support (including a very complete
>> implementation of filters and animation) do you know if Microsoft has
>> any plans to allow backing in and out of IE9?
>>
>> But here's the reasoning for my question: I will be reluctant to upgrade
>> campus labs, personal machines, or computers of clients to IE9, if it is
>> a major step backwards from IE/ASV, though I will clearly be interested
>> in doing testing and benchmarks to compare it with the other five major
>> browser implementations. In the past it has been very difficult to
>> concurrently run two different versions of IE on the same machine for
>> testing purposes, or, as I recall, to back in and out of different
>> plugins (Renesis v ASV, for example).
>>
>> regards
>> David
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Schepers" <doug@schepers.cc>
>> To: "ddailey" <ddailey@zoominternet.net>
>> Sent: Sunday, April 25, 2010 1:39 PM
>> Subject: Re: [svg-developers] no SMIL support in IE9 [was: ANN: SVG
>> Pastie.]
>>
>>
>>> Hi, David-
>>>
>>> A legitimate concern and one that should be expressed on www-svg... to
>>> wit, how do we transition to the FF3.7/IE9 world from the more
>>> functional ASV world? Should there be UA negotiation to make this easier?
>>>
>>> Regards-
>>> -Doug
>>
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 27 April 2010 08:28:12 UTC