In a follow up to my post yesterday...
What if Microsoft decided to be truly innovative with IE7? This is not far off the current goals of what they are trying to accomplish with Avalon. Also Opera seems to be right in line with this thinking to and just might put them back in the browser running until Firefox decides they have to compete again.
Here's the idea. Give us NATIVE support for SVG, allow SVG to be used in a CSS background-image and let it be used with a percentage for width and height.
It's really not that hard but it would completely change the web. XAML is actually a superset of SVG so Microsoft already has the capability, Opera already has built in SVG support in it mobile browser, Mozilla already has native support so a likely assumption is that Firefox isn't far behind (most likely in version 1.1) and pretty much everyone agrees that SVG is an Open Standard that should be supported by all the major players.
One of the only one really left behind now is Microsoft. If they were to actually provide native XAML support which is alot harder, you could get SVG as a bonus almost trivially.
Will they do it, probably not, so I am on a quest to find a way to actually make it work in current browsers using a technique similar to this one or maybe this.
By doing it with SVG you don't have to be stuck with Flash, why this is cool is because we can the use XSLT to replace certain aspects of the SVG and do it on the server, on the fly. Here is a fairly crude example but it does show the idea of what I am talking about.
So what does this gives us?
It gives us just about everything every designer has been bitching about since the dawn of the web. I think Mike Davidson put it best when he said: “we can’t deliver something classical typesetters have delivered since at least the 15th century”.
Not to mention the aggravation we have to go through just to make a gradient backgound with rounded corners for a region. These techniques are just silly when they could be style=”background-image: url(mySVGbg.svg);”
If Microsoft were to actually support this and a few other simple standards, the web would actually be an exciting place to design and develop for again. Right now it is degenerating into massive frustration at every turn when you want to deliver any other than plain text.
We really don't need all the SVG capabilities like animation and interactivity, all we really need is the vector drawing and filters that it provides. If you want to do animation, do it in Flash, interactivity is not really a bad think to have because then we could use SVG to make Aqua Style Buttons and piss off Apple. This could also lead to a bunch of new way to make annoying popups and cause security holes, but I'll leave that topic in the more capable hands of the broser developers because they should have a pretty good grasp on how to eliminate those annoyances by now.
Developers (at least this one) don't want to make whole sites in strictly SVG, we just want to use a few of the capabilities from it to fill the gaping holes in the short-comings of HTML and CSS. So, even if Opera, Mozilla and Firefox all supported SVG natively, it's not going to be widely used until its supported natively by Microsoft.
In conclusion, how are we going to provide backward compatibility? If there is a relatively simple way to do a background replacement through javascript like the sIFR technique, that would be sufficient enough for people to at least start experimenting with the idea.
When that happens, the entire landscape of the web will change, much for the better.
Copyright © 2003-2004 H. Steele Price, IV -
All opinions are my own, not necessarily those of my employer, your mother, or any government agency.