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My disagreement was with this statement:
"Michael, as far as SVG goes, until the day when Internet Explorer supports SVG natively,<snip/>"
My point is that I don't believe in any way that native support for SVG in IE is as important as you are making it seem. As I stated the ability to view SVG in IE exists and has existed for quite a while. The fact that in addition to the Adobe SVG plugin for IE both Mozilla/Firefox and Opera (Tiny SVG only) now have support will result in more sites offering SVG as a viewing option. While Moz/Fx may never take the majority share of the desktop market the impact that it has had and will continue to have on the development trends can not be taken for granted.
I do agree that XAML is an important technology as well. I'm a HUGE proponent of XAML. But I'm a huge proponent of SVG as well. At the moment, all that SVG can do XAML can do as well + the added benefit of integration into the .NET Framework Class Libraries. But thats only part of the story. The fact that SVG has a degree of separation from any specific platform lends well to its credibility as a cross-browser/cross-platform solution. This is an important point. It really does matter. Add to this the fact that the Mozilla Foundation has put heavy emphasis at bringing SVG support to the Mozilla platform while at the same time making it *EXTREMELY* easy to mix and match XUL, SVG, HTML/XHTML and you have what can easily be seen as a fairly sophisticated cross-platform solution that is right in line with what XAML has to offer as far as functionality is concerned.
What will result from this in the end? Well, with the impact that Moz/Fx has had thus far, I wouldn't turned a blind eye to what could very well become the defacto web-based standard for markup languages. XAML will still very much exist. With Mono's XAML implementation of courtesy of Google's Summer of Code this only makes XAML a stronger case as the basis for the defacto standard for cross-platform desktop applications. At the moment, while the line between web-based applications and desktop applications is becoming more and more transparent, its still exists, and probably will for at least another 3-5 years in one form or another. As such, its risky to say the least to underestimate the impact that the Moz/Fx XUL/XHTML/SVG/CSS solution can and more the likely will have on the future of web-based application development.
Another point to consider is the number of mobile phones/devices that now offer SVG support (via Tiny SVG) [SEE: http://svg.org/special/svg_phones] which as of this post stands at Seventy Two(72). As the mobile market continues to expand their support of SVG this will become and even more appealing option for web developers who are looking to maximize their reach while minimizing their overall code base. This factor alone could have a greater impact than any of the other points made above. Combined.
Time will tell.
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