I am a fan of standards as a means of presenting information and having the wide audience seeing the same thing. I was encouraged by Kurt Cagle’s post that “SVG has made it's way to the web” but I am not sure we are quite there. Of course, SVG has been used to present graphics on the web for some time but seeing the results has required some fancy footwork of plugins and careful selection of browser. I think Kurt is being a little premature in his announcement that “every single major browser on the desktop” will render even specific examples of SVG consistently.
I actually wondered what Kurt was talking about as I viewed his post in the stable Firefox 3.6.10 because the SVG was not rendered at all, but I was sufficiently interested to switch on my laptop with its standard Chrome browser.
Kurt used this artwork http://www.openclipart.org/people/jhnri4/Glass_cup_with_saucer.svg demonstrating one problem with using SVG as a standard graphic ..., I can’t include this image in my Google Doc directly. But a bit of cutting and pasting gets us this.
Kurt provides it scaled to a 240 pixel square in the blog and on my FireFox 4 display it looked like this …
On Chrome however the picture is scaled differently to give you a whole cup.
The SVG word art example in Kurt's blog was less successful, only appearing in Chrome. The scripting to change the word art did not work in Chrome or Firefox.
All this suggests that we have a way to go with our standards rendering.
[UPDATE : Came back to this later in the day and found that the word art scripting worked in FF4 and Chrome but that the wordart itself only rendered in Chrome]
