A couple of days ago on the IE Blog, it was announced that Mircrosoft would be joining the W3C SVG Working Group. So what? I hear you cry!
Why is this important?
SVG or “Scalable Vector Graphics” are, in a nutshell a way to describe scalable graphics using XML, or as the W3C dryly puts it:
SVG is a language for describing two-dimensional graphics and graphical applications in XML
Currently the “modern” browsers (Webkit, Firefox and mostly to give them credit Opera (the great browser nobody uses)) all have pretty decent levels of SVG support. As always the spawn of Satan IE, lags behind. Are you surprised? No I didn’t think so.
If in either a patched version of IE8, which compared to previous versions isn’t *that* bad, or in IE9 whenever it appears SVG support is decent, and built in then this means that web developers like me, can start using SVG a hell of a lot more. Mix this in with improved CSS3 support and we can start building accessible as well as interesting websites, without relying on (generally) non-accessible crap like Flash.
A whole wodge of very cool examples of SVG (often sprinkled in with some JavaScript magic) can be found here: http://www.carto.net/svg/samples/ (For best results use a modern browser!).