Publishing with Silicon

What is the world coming to? Never thought I’d see IE supporting SVG. We lobbied so hard 9 years ago, 8 years ago, and 7 years ago, until it felt like we were getting nowhere.

I remember Microsoft tried to hire me in 2002, having found me on the… SVG developers list. Now that was strange, what on earth were they doing stalking us XML geeks?

In a year or so, it became clear; XAML was highly derived from SVG, and would form the basis of WPF and Silverlight later. Unable to embrace a standard, MS had decided to copy standards activity into their own proprietary technology.

The poor SVG black sheep was even abandoned by Adobe itself when they eyed Macromedia/Flash, and enjoyed almost ZERO serious support over a few years, unless you count intensive emulation with XAML and later FXG, or the tireless efforts of a few diehards in places like the Mozilla project and Opera that kept SVG alive.

Fast forward 7 years, and we find Microsoft in the same boat with Apple, falling further behind Adobe’s Flash on the RIA front, with Silverlight piling up on the junkheap of obscurity along with Quicktime. With both proprietary efforts dead in the water, SVG is suddenly appealing to these would-be monopolies, and we find a bizarre rally behind a 10-year-old standard.

Why did they even bother to throw SVG into the mix with HTML5? Certainly the Canvas functionality can accomplish most or all of the core Flash capability that everyone (other than Adobe) wants. SVG and Canvas seem to have complimentary performance depending on what you’re doing. Still, who wants to learn how to do everything two different ways? Perhaps those railroading HTML5 through “spec” processes realize they won’t catch everything with the canvas approach, but more likely, they realize that this 2010 form of “standard” with Apple/Google pushing their rush “standard” out as Microsoft tails along, can have a better chance of flying with some stapled-on integrity from a bygone era.

It is still great to see, there is something really nice about the simplicity of core SVG, and it is fully ironic that its enemies have ended up having to support it despite their traditional opposition to standards. Apple, Google, Adobe, Microsoft have the same monopolistic agendas, yet are forced to co-exist, and let flowers like SVG grow through the cracks.

Today Steve Jobs called Adobe “Lazy.”

Flash has dramatically improved since Adobe bought Macromedia. Papervision 3D is a 3D engine that runs on Actionscript, this sort of capability was unheard of back when Macromedia ran Flash. 

Flash is spreading all over the place: set top boxes, TVs, phones, everywhere except the iPhone. It is ubiquitous for ads and video on the web. No wonder Steve is jealous. What is the install base of Quicktime?

Flash runs fine on every other phone. Is the iPhone buggy? no, it is intentionally dumbed down in the interest of rabid monopolistic tendencies of one eccentric genius.

Steve should remember that Apple would have died save for its use as a graphics platform running Adobe technology for a long stretch of time.

The iPhone will be a better device when it supports Flash.

As much as he has done for the company and the world, Steve Jobs really has conquered everything that needed conquering; the world needs a little less conquering and fewer dumbed-down, closed-source, “no VM allowed” systems like the iPhone and iPad.

With the iPad we witness the first case in history of computing where the limitations of a small device float upwards into a bigger device, instead of the opposite (remember when Moore’s law was a good thing?): who is lazy?