2008-12-04

SVG support in 2008

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have been playing with SVG lately. I haven't done any SVG for many years and I was curious how the browsers support them by the end of 2008. The overall picture would be quite satisfying, if our good old friend Internet Explorer wouldn't ruin it all.
The root of all problems is that IE6 and IE7 (i have no info on IE8) do not support SVG natively but by using the external Adobe SVG Viewer, which is going to be discontinued BTW.
Other problems you will face as an SVG developer:

1. HTML and SVG, now put them together
W3Schools created a page explaining the various methods, they are only wrong with the inlining. Inlining IS possible and it works in all modern browsers (ie not IE :) ). After spending some time on it, you can even make it work in IE6, thanks to this guide. Inlining in IE7? If you know how to do it, feel free to share with the rest of us.

2. Create elements dynamically
To create SVG elements on the fly, all modern browsers have the createElementNS method. Explorer doesn't have this, you can NOT create SVG elements dynamically, no tweaks, no tricks. If you want something like that, fell free to use VML (bah).

SVG is great, you can do pretty cool things in pretty cool browsers, if you dare:)

2 comments:

Ruud Steltenpool said...

- IE8 won't do SVG
- A comparison of SVG support in browsers
- Please contact w3schools.com to fix the issue
- Loads of SVG links

maschek said...

@stelt

Thanks for the links, w3schools notified.