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

We are working on coming up with clear strategies for Internet Explorer and hope to update developers on that soon.  I would, however, suggest that you avoid UA string detection and leverage the built in hasFeature in the DOM to detect SVG support, as well as more granular hasFeature in SVGDOM, and declarative <switch>.

I'd LOVE to see use cases that you are trying to cover.

-----Original Message-----
From: www-svg-request@w3.org [mailto:www-svg-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Doug Schepers
Sent: Monday, April 26, 2010 1:12 PM
To: ddailey
Cc: www-svg@w3.org
Subject: Re: Interim strategies for no SMIL (and other?) support in IE9

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 Monday, 3 May 2010 18:42:18 UTC