SVG in Internet Explorer

In recent years Internet Explorer has been like handcuffs to SVG development. There have been several attempts to find keys to loosen the chains. After Adobe’s abandonment of the plugin, those were mainly JavaScript libraries. Leveraging VML or Flash to draw vectors in Internet Explorer these attempts have been quite successful but had to remain their shim status. Then with Microsoft’s announcement of Internet Explorer 9 (ie9) on March 16, 2010 at their MIX conference, the commitment to native SVG support in Internet Explorer came as a long awaited relief. The testdrive site for the ie9 platform preview showcases one of the election maps that were presented at SVGopen 2009 and had been adapted in time for the MIX announcement to work with the early state of the implementation. From this experience it became clear that SVG in Internet Explorer needs to be a topic at SVGopen 2010 and independent views should counter possible marketing ploys. Finally sufficient time will be devoted to showing examples that already work in the Internet Explorer 9 platform preview with special emphasis if they worked right out of the box or what kind of adaptations were needed to make them work. Additionally the discussion will focus on mixing SVG with HTML. Microsoft claims that IE9 will be the first browser to support SVG right inside plain HTML, an approach that the SVG Web toolkit is mimicking already (in contrast to namespacing in XHTML that is used in Firefox, Webkit and Opera).