In 2008, OpenAjax Alliance led an industry-wide browser wishlist initiative, where Ajax industry leaders produced a prioritized list of features that Ajax developers needed in future browsers. The top feature on that list was ubiquitous support for 2D vector graphics in the form of SVG and Canvas.

There is good news and bad news on the 2D graphics front today. The good news is that 4 out of 5 major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari) not only support both SVG and Canvas, but have made significant advances in the past 12 months to add features and improve performance.

The bad news is that IE supports neither. Because IE has majority market share, Ajax developers who are determined to use standards-based 2D graphics have been forced to use create JavaScript wrapper libraries for 2D graphics such as dojo.gfx, which renders using SVG on Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari, and renders using VML on IE. Unfortunately, VML has such slow rendering performance that many 2D applications are not viable on a cross-browser basis.

The big news is that Google has teamed with the open source community to produce a phenomenal project called SVGWeb which brings SVG to IE. The SVGWeb project achieves its magic by rendering using native browser SVG engines when available (i.e., Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari) and then parsing and rendering SVG on IE by leveraging Flash under the hood. Note that the Flash plugin ships with every copy of Windows, so wherever IE is, Flash is available. What this means is that standards-compliant vector graphics via SVG is now available across all browsers.

SVGWeb is an amazingly complete implementation of SVG 1.1. It includes support for nearly all of SVG graphics features, its interactive features (e.g., mouse events) and its animation features. Additionally, the community has added support for audio and video (using markup from SVG Tiny 1.2).

Besides playing a leadership role with the SVGWeb project, Google is also offering its facilities to host the SVG Open conference, which will take place at Google’s Mountain View on October 2-4. (Note: OpenAjax Alliance is a conference sponsor.)

I strongly recommend that people sign up for this conference, particularly people who live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Attendance fees are very reasonable ($320 normal, $160 for students). Most of the conference occurs on the weekend. The theme is “SVG – Coming of Age”, which is clearly appropriate since, thanks to SVGWeb, SVG is now available across all major browsers.