dojo-svg kicks off
Web June 23rd, 2006
Before this project is launched, dojo’s developers have made significant progress to explore how to integrate SVG support. Another candidate for the back-end render engine is VML. There are two projects in dojo SoC 2006, dojo-svg & dojo-vml, a universal interface is developed to glue the Gfx API and various back-end rendering engine. I prefer dojo-svg, since VML is only rendered within Microsoft Internet Explorer, while SVG is supported natively by Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, or any browsers with Adobe SVG plugin.
SVG is a complicated protocol, current specification is 1.1, v1.2 draft is still in progress. The good news is I don’t need to implement all the features of the specification, current work is still a proof of correctness. Here is a snapshot of the current achievement.
Will this run fast and efficiently on my browser though? I use firefox but sometimes it chugs like crazy and lags my computer.
What do you think about that:
http://www.svg-vml.net/
Fabulous VML! no?
and that:
http://www.web-vector-image.net/
Does VML come back?
I do not think so. IE9 is loaded with hardware-accelerated SVG and canvas support, and no one, including Microsoft is going to invest more on VML. Microsoft Word is the only widely-used application spitting VML bits for the sake of backward compatibility.