Macromedia Jumps on the SVG Bandwagon (sort of)
By Chris Kaminski | July 21st, 2004 | Filed in Web Standards (general)
Skip to comment form/. is reporting that Macromedia will support SVGT in it’s mobile player. An article from Macromedia explaining the decison has drawn fire from O’Reilly’s Antoine Quint for what he perceives as inaccuracies in Macromedia’s article.
I don’t know the technology well enough to know whether Quint has a point or not, and the /. thread predictably descends into mindless Flash-bashing, but the articles themselves are an interesting read.
It seems that while mobile networks and devices are typically locked-down by large carriers — at least when one compares them to the Internet and PCs — vector graphics is one area where the mobile arena may be more open and standards-friendly than the WWW.
One has to wonder: might SVG’s success in the mobile space give it a second chance on the WWW? SVG hasn’t gotten much traction on the Web, no doubt due in large part to the success of Macromedia’s Flash. And designing for mobile devices is different enough from designing for PCs that developing a single UI for both with the same technology isn’t a compelling enough proposition to start a mass migration to SVG. However, the proliferation of SVG viewers and authoring tools for mobile devices can’t hurt SVG’s chances of staging a comeback on the PC.
Here’s hoping, anyway.