IE used to have SVG support via an Adobe plugin. Then they bought the Flash crap and suddenly the SVG plugin went away. Can't have competition I guess.

It's not bad performance, and useful for applets, but you don't want to use it for layout unless having dozens of little flash applets all over the page turns you on.

Despite the video being very very dry, there was an interesting link in the middle of the presentation: http://downloadstats.mozilla.com/ [mozilla.com]

That site features real time download statistics for FF3.5. The interesting part is, that the map at the top is rendered in real SVG combined with canvas (for the dots).

About this flash based library: it's strange. At the demo page the native rendering of SVG failed and only the flash version worked on my FF 3.0.x.. Not a problem with my browser though, as the site I mentioned at the top as well as Wikipedia SVG's work fine. Something is not right with this library, but interesting non the less.

I work for a large US national lab and for a period of about two months they blocked IE7 and forced you to go to either firefox or IE8 to surf the web. (and yes, it was suggested in that order.)

That depends on what audience you're targeting. If you're building a website for a government institution, then yes, you need to support IE, including IE6. If, on the other hand, you have commercial considerations, and can deliver a real *web app* by dropping IE, then you have some thinking to do. Maybe you could just drop IE6 -- if youtube can do it then it's probably a safe move. But if you know that you can provide a really significant improvement in usability by supporting only modern/compliant browsers, then being a "good web designer" would be to tell IE users that in order to fully experience this particular site, they need a better platform.

I am part of the 95% of users with Flash, but I don't like it. I use Firefox, so I shouldn't have to enable Flash to view SVG documents, but the same could be said for watching videos and navigating a website.

My concern is that many websites that use SVG will require Flash on all browsers, not just the ones using IE.

As a website builder, svg is more then just pictures, if i had it available to me i would create entire websites using it. ( xhtml+svg )

why?

because then i can finally present people with websites that look exactly the same everywhere and fill your entire browser screen.
dynamic design, dynamic fonts, dynamic everything. no more fixed layout design.

While i don't thing this new plugin is going to be the holy grail, it love to see them push in the right direction :)

When discussions of supporting various versions of browsers come up, it is important to know what browsers are actually visiting your site. Earlier this year IE6 users to one of my sites dipped below 10%. Since then, it has now been ~3% for the past month.

Now I no longer stress about IE6. I'll check it to make sure the site is at least functional and usable in IE6. But I no longer strive for pixel-perfect compatibility. It's simply not worth it.

You can spend the extra hours getting it to work for all browsers and end up using hacks and mangling your HTML/CSS to do so, but if all of that work is only for a small percentage of your user base, it is not worth it.

90%? What? That's a bit odd. Really, it's <70% and dropping like a rock.

See for yourself here [wikimedia.org]. (Requires SVG-capable browser.)

So true.

I'm currently in the process of developing a few websites. IE is a pain in the nikta because of the way it renders the stuff. However, it has been quite more pleasing in some javascript details (doing client based XSLT transformations, for example, is working better in IE than in Firefox, which fscks up everything and adds elements not in the XML or the XSL).

Microsoft is becoming AOL. A crappy, proprietary, expensive, unreliable impediment to getting onto the internet. Their applications have plateaued, and open-source desktop and web-based competitors are improving rapidly. They'll hang on longer, but they've begun their long decline.

The true Slashdot geek can't post about Microsoft without his brain dissolving into mush. Fantasy rules and reality is an intrusion.

Listen to one of your own:

And then there's Microsoft. The company prints billions of dollars worth of profits each quarter from its Windows franchise, yet for years it has been quietly developing its next big operating system. And no, I'm not referring to Windows 7.

Microsoft has created a bridge "between personal productivity and line-of-business applications," one that stitches together Microsoft's "desktop" dominance with its cloud ambitions.

It's called SharePoint, and with over 100 million seats and $1 billion in revenue, the odds are that your company already has it installed.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer long ago declared that "SharePoint is the definitive operating system or platform for the middle tier," and I don't think he's using the term "operating system" lightly.

Increasingly, SharePoint is the center of the Microsoft universe, at least, for enterprise computing. SharePoint serves as the hub for Microsoft's suite of operating systems, applications, and third-party software. It is a content application server, of sorts, one that provides the platform upon which so much of Microsoft's value is now being built.

I've disparaged SharePoint in the past for its tendency to lock customers into its proprietary repository. But let's be clear: a large number of companies seem perfectly happy to make that trade-off and are actively using SharePoint at the heart of their intranets, extranets, and Web sites.

Microsoft, Google, and VMware redefine the OS [cnet.com]

Matt Assay is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management.

He was even blunter when speaking to The New York Times:

SharePoint is saving Microsoft's Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in. It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping."

Microsoft's SharePoint Thrives in the Recession [nytimes.com]

Ha. You have NO idea!

First of all, that company is dead and gone, because they did what they did. So yeah, very wise of them... ^^

Second, it's not the page views. It's the clicks on ads that are worth money. Page views *cost* money!
My former employer wanted money. Not page views per se.

Third, making stuff run in IE took so much time, that by stopping to do it, we would actually have made money!

Fourth, I left the company to found my own, because I found them to be literally to fuckin' stupid to understand the Internet. Hell, the boss of content used AOL to surf the web! And their "design" team simply tried to clone Apple, every time they came up with "something new". I mean, when I started there, the local "development team" rejected my recommendation to make a library out of the design (HTML tables snippets back then) so we could quickly update it, because, and I quote "Functions are too complicated."... Yes, they meant the concept of calling functions in a server-side language like PHP! I'm not kidding!

So you really got no idea! ^^

I liked SVG, back in 2004/05 I wrote an interactive map application using SVG and what's now known as AJAX in IE5.

I read that Adobe was on the standards commitee for SVG, and piled tons of unneeded crap into the spec to try and make it a 'Flash Killer', but once they aquired Macromedia they stopped caring... and they were the only one that did.

There may never be a full implementation of the SVG spec, it's just too cumbersome, and outdated at this point.