Microsoft joins SVG working group, moves towards vendor-neutral open standards

Patrick Dengler, a senioer program manager for the Internet Explorer team, announced that Microsoft is joining the W3C’s Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) working group, with ambitions to work with the group on future versions of the SVG standard. This indicates that Microsoft intends to play a larger role in advancing open Web standards going forward.

Until recently, Microsoft’s own browser, MSIE, has gotten a lot of bad press for its lack of standards compliance and interoperability. They have been working to solve these problems, and has been working with more web standards groups in the hopes to gain more developer support, especially with their work with the HTML5 editing process and their support for HTML5 audio and video elements.

Microsoft has not yet committed to SVG, but it is starting to lean in that direction. Its own XML-based graphics format, called VML, have specialized code paths for generating VML for IE users, which increases the difficulty of using vector-based graphics. If they implement and support SVG in MSIE, these problems would simply disappear and allow proper support and adoption of SVG by the developer community.

Dengler stated “As a part of Microsoft’s continued commitment to interoperability and standards support, yesterday we submitted our request to join the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). We’re excited to take part in ensuring future versions of the SVG spec will meet the needs of developers and end users. We recognize that vector graphics are an important component of the next generation Web platform.”