A Developer Peaks at Internet Explorer 9: Canvas and SVG

The SVG working group met recently, and sent the latest SVG 1.1 proposal to the W3C, moving on to SVG 2.0. Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 will support 20 of 23 areas in SVG 1.1, but left out SVG fonts, filters and support for SMIL, leaving developers pondering their next move.

Microsoft is holding its own in the browser wars–its implementation of SVG isn’t far from the working group’s approach. IE9 won’t be supporting the full feature-set of SVG 1.1, but those elements that aren’t supported by IE9 are not supported by Firefox yet either–Firefox’s SMIL support is said to be forthcoming.

Microsoft’s reluctance to embrace SMIL is understandable. They say their own HTML+Time declarative animation is almost never used, and the CSS/SVG Task Force at the W3C is looking towards CSS 3 animations, which runs against the grain from SMIL. As Doug Schepers from the SVG Working Group stated, “since the SVG WG intends to coordinate with the CSS WG to make some changes to animation and to extend filters, it’s probably best that IE9 doesn’t lock those into their current states”.