Microsoft wants to participate in SVG development

Patrick Dengler, the lead program manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, has announced in a post on the IE Blog that Microsoft hopes in future to contribute to the development of the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format. According to the executive, Microsoft has submitted a request to join the W3C's relevant working group.

SVG is a dialect of XML which supports the usual graphics primitives and operations as well as events. In principle, this allows interactive graphical applications to be developed using SVG. However, the graphics format is not yet fully supported by all browsers. For Internet Explorer, it has so far only been available via a plug-in. That Microsoft now wants to participate in SVG development gives reason to hope that the format will be integrated in future versions of Internet Explorer.

Microsoft has so far been involved in developing two web graphics formats – VML and XAML. VML (Vector Markup Language), developed in 1998, is a predecessor of SVG. XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) is, for example, used for describing the interfaces ofSilverlight. SVG is used for the icons and themes in the KDE4 Linux desktop, amongst others.

(crve)