For the record, Firefox has displayed native svg for some time now...as does Google Chrome... But then, they both comply with International Internet standards [?] Simply open Firefox and either enter the file address in the URI window on top or drag the file from a folder and drop it on a blank Firefox page. Web pages that embed svg images will display them just like any other graphics format -- but unless you create your own, it will be hard to find one. Web designers have had to avoid the use of svg, given the curse of the installed Microsoft base.

That said, the svg standard is evolving, and unlike more mature graphics we haven't developed a good standards compliance test yet since the rendering of the last 4-5% of the proposed features has not settled down. The vast majority of the standard has been accepted -- by everyone but Microsoft, which is a real bummer for we web designers who want to make our web sites work for them as well. To date, they've only been helpful when it benefits their objectives. Their major objective now is to try to try to slow down their rapidly declining share of browser users. At last count, all versions of IE accounted for less than 60% of browsers in use world-wide (and dropping every month), Firefox now accounts for 27% and is growing rapidly.

The sad truth is that it may take years for all the current IE browsers out there to be replaced with newer versions (even if they do miraculously start to comply with standards) -- or be replaced by one of the non-Microsoft standards-compliant browsers. Meanwhile, to reach the largest possible Internet audience, we have to kludge our sites to work around IE's shortcomings. I've recently given up trying to support IE6 users, since it is *so* out of compliance -- I'm hoping there really aren't that many of them left out there.

Jack [*Full disclosure notice*: I donate time to Mozilla, developer of Firefox, including beta testing new versions that extend the existing svg rendering capabilities. I formerly worked with several W3C standards committees and still actively comment on the standards development process for a number of them.]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 12:28 PM, John Culleton <john@...1668...>wrote:

Just for fun I created an Inkscape file with an aqua square on it and saved it as svg. Then I addressed the file name in my Firefox browser. It showed it OK.

I have read that reading svg files was promised in IE 9 for Windows users. Any of you who have Windows 7 and/or IE 9 can you verify that this is so? I want to create some web entities in svg but not if I am shut off from all or almost all IE users. -- John Culleton "Create Book Covers with Scribus" http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html

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Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Inkscape-user mailing list Inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-user

Hi John,

I would guess that all you can read about IE9 is probably just speculation (unless it is from an official MS source).

I was recently at the SVG Open 2009 conference. Microsoft was a silver sponsor and sent three employees to the conference. However, as usual for big corporations there were no promises about upcoming SVG support.

While I think that chances are higher (because customer demand SVG support and the European Union is complaining about unsupported web standards in IE) there is no official confirmation that SVG will be in IE9.

There are however workarounds:

* The SVGWeb project takes existing SVG content and renders it in Flash with a Javascript shim: http://code.google.com/p/svgweb/ * The GoogleChromFrame plugins supports SVG and Canvas and other stuff to the same extent that Webkit supports it * MozIE is a similar plugin based solution based on the Mozilla engine * there are plenty of Javascript projects supporting vector graphics and render it to either one of SVG/VML/Flash/Silverlight, based on what is available in the browser: see dojo.gfx, Raphael, AmpleSDK, etc.

I think of all the above, SVGWeb is very interesting as it renders the SVG without having to modify the SVG source (just a few parameters in the object tag and linked js) - and Flash is installed on almost all IE's, more than 90% market share ...

Have a look at http://www.svgopen.org/2009/registration.php?section=abstracts_and_proceedin... for presentations and papers.

Thanks, Andreas

John Culleton wrote:

Just for fun I created an Inkscape file with an aqua square on it and saved it as svg. Then I addressed the file name in my Firefox browser. It showed it OK.

I have read that reading svg files was promised in IE 9 for Windows users. Any of you who have Windows 7 and/or IE 9 can you verify that this is so? I want to create some web entities in svg but not if I am shut off from all or almost all IE users.