Why it’s important for Opera to also focus on SVG?
5 CommentsPublished September 12th, 2007 11:22 AM EDT By Daniel Goldman
With the recent improvements to Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) in Opera 9.5, Opera now passes 93.4% of the W3C’s test suite (the tests were run by Jeff Schiller). The improved SVG support makes Opera the most compliant SVG browser (see graph).
The question we often get from web developers is why does Opera spend so much time on implementing SVG rather than focusing on site compatibility issues and other more important things?
David Storey (Opera’s Chief Web Opener) made the following points on his blog to answer this question.
- We have different developers that work on different areas, so working on SVG isn’t taking people off JavaScript or CSS layout, for example
- SVG was often a carrier requirement for inclusion on mobile devices, and is much more useful and widespread in the mobile world, than it is on desktop.
- It is a standard that shows promise once support is widespread, and if we are going to do something, we are going to do it properly
- SVG is very useful on things like device projects where Opera is the interface to the device using WebUI. Think games consoles for instance
- Other browser vendors like Safari and Firefox are adding SVG support and it shouldn’t be too long before get good quality cross browser support. IE will be the problem, and in that way it will be similar to the PNG situation pre IE7, but IE is under active development now and they have a great team, so I wouldn’t rule them out.
(Read David Storey’s blog post)
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Oooo, i sea the svg( http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Test/20061213/htmlObjectHarness/full-index.html ) Really….With Firefox not work
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Har-PRP4X9U
Chris Double’s post
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Vladimir Vukićević ported a Silverlight demo to SVG. photos.svg
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IE7 is still a problem with SVGs (I’m not sure how that is exactly with Opera and Firefox, but they’ve never posed a problem for me… IE7 has).
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“Vladimir Vukićević ported a Silverlight demo to SVG. photos.svg”
– Nice concept!
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SVG is just great and I really love to see the good support in Opera. Using SVG in CSS backgrounds just puts it one step further!
And in my eyes, I think it was the right decision to first support declarative animation and then add ECMAScript. Declarative animation is one thing that is so great about SVG, and It’s good that now finally Batik supports this as well. Let’s hope Firefox will catch up.
The only really sad thing is Microsoft pushing Silverlight, which might prevent them from supporting SVG, just because of tactical considerations. They want to convince people that Silverlight is the thing, and that would be harder with such an excellent technology as SVG in direct competition.
By the way: It’s a bit funny to see the firefox people add support for the HTML5 video element, and put this into SVG via foreignObject. The latest SVG draft proposed a video element way before HTML5 was born…