It's sad that so much work had to be done by Google to get these standards available to IE users. Had IE been open source, a few patches would have been released to the upstream maintainers, and a fix could have been released years ago.
It's sad that so much work had to be done by Google to get these standards available to IE users.
Good point, it's things like this that make me wonder where anyone gets the idea that Microsoft will ever be able to be a serious, long term contender to Google in Internet related tech, search included -- right now, Bing is a (perceived) contender merely because of Microsoft's size compared to Google. Google is able to keep their main product, search, going while actively working to improve other companies' deficient and ancient products. Admittedly, Google has an interest in getting people to use the Internet more and this kind of tech is part of that goal, but these kinds of releases somehow show that Google doesn't really consider Microsoft to be a (serious) competitor, whereas Microsoft does.
"Google has an interest in getting people to use the Internet more"
And that is why Microsoft is on a hiding to nothing. They're producing search engines and browsers yet paradoxically, they lose power and money as people use the internet more. Something's got to give before they can start pulling in a single direction.
Once dropped in you get partial support for SVG 1.1, SVG Animation (SMIL), Fonts, Video and Audio, DOM and style scripting through JavaScript, and more in about a 60K library. Your SVG content can be embedded directly into normal HTML 5 or through the OBJECT tag. If native SVG support is already present in the browser than that is used, though you can override this and have the SVG Web toolkit handle things instead. No downloads or plugins are necessary other than _Flash_ which is used for the actual rendering, so its very easy to use and incorporate into an existing web site. [emphasis mine]
I'm curious as to why they did not translated it to VML like excanvas does. I guess there may be parts of SVG that's a poor fit to VML, and Flash also will make it possible to have it work with any browser with a flash plugin, not just IE.
I haven't looked at their code (though I will definitely try this project out soon!), but I'd guess that their javascript library is parsing the SVG then dynamically replacing it with a flash object. I've seen some type-layout libraries that do the same thing using Flash, so that you can use non-standard fonts on your website.
