Anyway, with Ferraiolo’s clarifications regarding Adobe’s continued support of SVG (including improving Illustrators support of SVG), it seems that it’s too early to count Adobe completely out of the game and now the above Adobe section just looks like FUD…oh well…

In terms of projects under active development,you miss out WebKit, derived from the second round of SVG support in the Linux KDE browser,Konqueror; used by Apples Safari browser and alsoby Nokia’s own new open source mobile browser.

Speaking of mobile, the very active implementation work by Ikivo and Bitflash should be noted too. eSVG from Intesis is reguarly updated, as well. And the SharpVectors SVG#product shipped a new relaese recently.

What I meant to say is that if I were the Google Local Product Manager 6 months or a year ago I would have had to consider my options. I could go with Flash, Java, SVG, or VML. SVG clients were scarce, and ASV hasn’t been rev’d, with the exception of some CYA security releases in almost 3 years (or 4 years if you are looking from today’s perspective.)

90%+ of my audience had IE (with VML)…it was arguably easier to generate and open via APIs than say, Flash and anything is lighter weight than Java, not to mention both Flash and VML have greater adoption. So VML was a fairly logical choice with server side rasterization for non VML clients.

Would I like to see Google Local use SVG? No question, but these decisions are rarely made on “religious” grounds. But as the Google Local Product Manager, I would have a pretty hard time justifying that at this time unless I wanted to target mobile devices. Of course Google could transcode SVG into VML for non-SVG based clients and rasterize it on the server for clients that had neither SVG nor VML support…is that cheaper and/or better? I honestly can’t say because I haven’t tried to crunch the numbers.

Down the road, if Safari adds SVG support there will be three browsers with some level of SVG support. Assuming that they implement enough of the same SVG features, that will amount to something like 15% of the market. That’s not huge, but it isn’t small either.

Of course none of these technologies are standing still. SWF has been adding dynamic content capabilities and a more robust application architecture. Adobe is pushing PDF into new areas and creating new clients (Apollo). Meanwhile, Microsoft is coming up with a fantastic set of vector based technologies and more importantly, impressive authoring tools, and promises that this will be supported across a wide range of platforms. As a Google PM I would also have to consider what’s best for the future of my product as well as what works in today’s environment.

“I know that there are many SVG “secret” projects that we don’t see public mention of. SVG is used behind the scenes in a variety of situations with great success, but outside the limelight.”

JEFF>>> This is the problem I think – SVG needs to be elevated to “limelight” status

“The only points I would take issue with are the “Final Words”. At this point, what business justification will drive Google and Flicker to adopt SVG?”

JEFF>>> What “business justification” existed for Google to use VML instead of contructing PNGs in their Google Maps? I guess it mostly had to do with IE’s transparent PNG support (?), but certainly it’s also less work for their servers and more elegant for the end user. Same things apply for SVG support. Granted the installed base of Internet Explorers is significant compared to SVG-enabled browsers. But support for SVG could be also considered a blow against Microsoft’s XAML technology… Google doesn’t have a competing technology here and they did financially back open source work on Inkscape in Google’s Summer of Code this year (which I was delighted to hear about).

As for Flickr, well it’s harder to justify since they already use HTML (Ajaxified) and Flash, and Flash is so widely supported. It’s harder to build a solid business case for SVG support in Flickr other than “making friends with the SVG community” and “avoiding Adobe lock-in”

Anyway, I never said my “Final Words” were realistic but more like “wishful thinking” (as indicated by putting them on my list to Santa)

It’s a great pity that, approximately ten years after the need for standardized vector graphics for the web was identified as a requirement, adoption is still so patchy. We need scalable graphics for future high-resolution displays, something that NeWS and Display PostScript flirted with in the 1980s, but which we seem to have forgotten since. Sigh.