Comment Feed for Microsoft and Adobe Killing SVG? (Joshua on MIX Online)

Re: Re: Microsoft and Adobe Killing SVG?

Tsingi — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 03:59:05 GMT

It shouldn't be difficult to get a XAML load on a path, or any other SVG in fact, just change the names of the Elements and the Attributes from the XAML grammar to the SVG grammar and you're done.

Look for yourself.

The arc segment in the SVG path is quite unusual, the brainchild of Philip Mansfield (Math PhD, SVG WG Member Author). Coincidently, the XAML arc segment is exactly the same, as is the encoding of the other dozen or so path segments.

Regarding the previous commentors opinion that Adobe sells authoring tools, I agree. I've always wondered why Macromedia were so vehemently against SVG when they make their money on authoring tools, why they didn't embrace SVG.

In both cases I have to assume that it's ownership and control of the format; I can offer no other explaination.

Re: Microsoft and Adobe Killing SVG?

jongalloway — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 08:14:27 GMT

I don't believe Expression Blend imports SVG, just Expression Design. Correct?

Since portions of SVG and XAML are very similar, it's unfortunate that WPF and Silverlight don't have native support (albeit limited) for SVG. For instance, it'd be nice if Silverlight had a "LoadFromSVG()" the same way it has "LoadFromXaml()". I wouldn't care if it just supported text and simple paths, it'd be helpful and would show at least some thought towards supporting existing vector graphics standards. I believe it would also encourage adoption - right now the solution to using SVG in Silverlight is to buy one or more Expression products, or hunt around for some random, unsupported utility or webpage. That's not the best way to encourage broad adoption of the Silverlight platform.

I wrote a bit about this back in June; unfortunately I think most people assumed I was just complaining about WPF not using SVG (which was not my point at all).
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2007/06/05/silverlight-and-xaml-have-you-guys-met-old-man-svg.aspx

Re: Microsoft and Adobe Killing SVG?

allenjs — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:24:46 GMT

@kmontgom: in the XML team, we were writing all of our specs in XML to dogfood (as in "eat your own dogfood) the process. By the same token, the office team also built tools for XML document authors, so they wrote specs using InfoPath and XML. SVG was designed to work well in XML documents, which is why we liked it.

Conversely, Avalon was part of Longhorn team (Windows OS), and they were NOT building a product intended for making XML documents, so they didn't have a good reason to dogfood XML authoring. So they gravitated to just using MS Word for their specs.

Also I am sure SVG was used other places besides just specs -- I only used the specs example to show that there was never any hostility to SVG. MSFT still considers SVG to be positive to neutral, and I bet Adobe feels exactly the same.

Re: Microsoft and Adobe Killing SVG?

kmontgom — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 18:19:57 GMT

... you never do say why the WPF/Avalong team stopped using SVG.