In a new sign of Microsoft's ambitions to make Internet Explorer more competitive with rival browsers, the company said Tuesday it's joining a group overseeing a graphics format that offers some advantages for today's Web.
Specifically, Microsoft signed up for the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Working Group, part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, Opera Software's Opera, and Google's Chrome all support the SVG format along with a different variety of graphics called Canvas 2D.
"We recognize that vector graphics are an important component of the next-generation Web platform," said Patrick Dengler, senior program manager on Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, in a blog post. "As evidenced by our ongoing involvement in W3C working groups, we are committed to participating in the standards process to help ensure a healthy future for the Web. Our involvement with the SVG working group builds on that commitment."
Dengler didn't commit to add SVG to IE, and the company declined to comment about that possibility when asked.
But Microsoft has lit a fire under its browser team to make Internet Explorer more competitive and to comply with various standards, so it would be surprising if the company didn't do so at some point. Microsoft's SVG work could have effects beyond IE, too: though Microsoft has a browser to build, it also has an interest in being able to build demanding, rich Web applications such as its online version of Microsoft Office.
Bitmap images, such as this part of Wikipedia's logo, don't scale gracefully to different sizes.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
SVG lets this Wikipedia logo be shown as many pixels wide as you'd like.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Most graphical elements on the Web today are encoded with file formats such as JPEG that produce a grid of pixels called a bitmap, but vector graphics formats such as SVG can be useful for drawing objects such as logos that can scale to large or small sizes. That's particularly useful in today's world where Web sites must work on everything from tiny mobile-phone screens to 30-inch monitors.
In October, Google hosted a conference on SVG. Brad Neuberg, a Google programmer and speaker at the conference, said at the time that Web programmers are hesitant to embrace a technology that's not built into Internet Explorer, which remains dominant despite gradually dwindling share of worldwide usage.
"It's hard to deploy this when you can't use it on most of the installed base," Neuberg said in an earlier interview.
SVG fans can take heart in the enthusiasm Dengler expressed for the format.
"To date, I have had several interactions with the SVG Working Group, and their clear dedication to creating a great technology for end users and developers alike stands out," he said. "I personally look forward to future and more direct involvement with this great set of folks."
An official response from the SVG group arrived in the blog post comments:
"On behalf of the SVG WG, let me welcome you to the group. We're excited by your joining, and look forward to your participation...and hopefully SVG support in IE9!" said Doug Schepers. "There is definitely room for improvement in the SVG specs, and some new features to make it even easier to author... Your help there will be really valuable."
Microsoft is working on related technology in the upcoming IE 9 browser that could help SVG, too. It's rebuilding the browser on a graphics foundation called Direct2D that brings hardware acceleration to graphics and text display on Windows Vista and Windows 7. That foundation should accelerate handling of graphics including SVG and Canvas 2D, Microsoft has said.
Corrected 7:31 p.m. PST to clarify that Canvas 2D graphics, although they can be constructed by software, still use a bitmap format.
After leaving much of the creation of a new version of HTML to Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla, Microsoft has begun sinking its teeth into the Web standard.
The move adds clout to the effort to renovate HyperText Markup Language, the standard used to describe Web pages, which last was formally updated in 1999. In a mailing list posting on Friday, the software giant offered a host of questions and concerns with the present proposal.
"As part of our planning for future work, the IE team is reviewing the current editor's draft of the HTML5 spec and gathering our thoughts. We want to share our feedback and discuss this in the working group," said Internet Explorer Program Manager Adrian Bateman in the message. "I will post our notes as we collect them so we can iterate on our thinking more quickly. At this stage we have more questions than answers, but I believe that discussing them in public is the best way to make progress."
HTML 5 in its current draft form includes a number of significant advancements, notably several that make the Web a better foundation for applications, not just static Web pages. Among the present HTML 5 features are built-in video and audio, the ability to store data on a local computer to enable use of Web applications even when offline, Web Workers that can perform computational chores in the background without bogging down Web application responsiveness, Canvas for creating sophisticated two-dimensional graphics, and drag-and-drop for better Web application user interfaces.
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The E-mail Standards Project is urging Twitter users to pressure Microsoft to support better HTML formatting in Outlook.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Dave Greiner was distressed in 2007 when Microsoft decided to use Microsoft Word's relatively rudimentary technology to display HTML-encoded e-mail in Outlook. Now, facing the extension of that choice into the forthcoming Office 2010, he's agitating more loudly for change.
Greiner, a member of the informal E-mail Standards Project group, set up a Web site called FixOutlook.org and urged everybody who agrees with his position to publicize their dismay on Twitter; more than 19,000 did so by Wednesday afternoon.
Microsoft, while encouraging feedback on the matter, stood by its decision in a response published on the Microsoft Office Team blog.
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