Ah, the benefits of keeping your ear to the RSS/Atom wire. I found this entry in the svg-developers Yahoo! newsgroup which hints that the next version of Google Maps will have support for SVG. Looks like my Christmas Wish (see bottom of entry) may come true after all.

I followed some of the links, and it looks like the currently pre-alpha version of the Google Maps API (version 2.37) does indeed use some JavaScript to create a SVG <path> element (search for "svg" and "path"). Unfortunately, this thread says there are some bugs in the code (non-SVG related) that prevent people from using it at the moment.

Of course it's a little premature, maybe Google will decide that integrating SVG within an HTML page is too much of a hack job. I know I have given up once or twice on that, myself due to browser issues but seem to have struck upon a somewhat reasonable solution recently. Of course if they restrict their SVG usage to only Firefox and Opera, it will simplify the integration.

Anyway, if the next version of Google Maps does have SVG support it will surely be a sign that SVG is here to stay (even if Yahoo seems to have gone with a Flash-based approach). Looks like Mozilla's decision to include limited SVG support in Firefox 1.5 was a good one for SVG adoption after all.