Article:		SVG: A Sure Bet
Subject:		Mozilla "support" for SVG (State the current situation not just the possible future...)
Date:		2003-07-18 08:42:12
From:		Damian Cugley
Response to: State the current situation not just the possible future...
Mozilla has, sadly, with the best possible intentions, put SVG support back several years. First, changes to the plug-in API made Mozilla incompatible with Adobe's SVG viewer 3. Second, the built-in SVG support does not handle a large subset of SVG, is missing many features. It does not help that the Mozilla plan for showing SVG in an HTML document is that the SVG code be mixed in with the HTML document, as opposed to living in a separate resource linked to with an 'object' or 'img' element. There is no way to write a document that will work with both these approaches. Mozilla is my regular web browser, but when I want to run SVG demos, I have to fire up Internet Explorer to do it. Sad.

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• Mozilla "support" for SVG (State the current situation not just the possible future...)
  2003-07-19 11:27:00 Paul Prescod [Reply]
  
  

  First, changes to the plug-in API made Mozilla incompatible with Adobe's SVG viewer 3.

  
  

  This has surely done more to hurt Mozilla than SVG. But anyhow, ASV6 will be released soon and that annoying period will be behind us.

  
  

  Second, the built-in SVG support does not handle a large subset of SVG, is missing many features.

  
  

  Standard-build Mozilla's do not have any SVG support and probably will not until the development has reached a more mature point. In the meantime, the plugin suffices.

  
  

  It does not help that the Mozilla plan for showing SVG in an HTML document is that the SVG code be mixed in with the HTML document, as opposed to living in a separate resource linked to with an 'object' or 'img' element. There is no way to write a document that will work with both these approaches.

  
  

  I expect that Mozilla will be able to display standalone SVG resources or OBJECT-embedded resources in addition to SVG mixed with HTML. But until the Mozilla implementation is mature it does not make much sense for Mozilla to prevent the Adobe implementation from handling OBJECT tags. Nevertheless, mixed namespace documents are undoubtably the future we should be working towards. That's what XML was designed to support and newer SVG features move more and more in that direction. It isn't an issue of either/or. We need both inline and out-of-line SVG.