Berners-Lee unhappy with IE8

 

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Posted on 12 Sep 2008 at 09:30

Tim Berners-Lee has a bone to pick with Microsoft over Internet Explorer's handling of vector graphics.

Berners-Lee, directors of web-standards body W3C, claims that Internet Explorer is trailing other browsers in its lack of support for scalable vector graphics.

SVG is a way of encoding web images so that they can be resized or zoomed without losing resolution, and can be commonly found in online maps.

"If you look around at browsers, you'll find that most of them support scalable vector graphics," Berners-Lee tells the Associated Press. "I'll let you figure out which one has been slow in supporting SVG."

While Firefox, Safari and Chrome have built-in support for SVG, Microsoft supports another format for vector graphics called Vector Markup Language. This is despite W3C professing its support for the alternative since 2001.

Internet Explorer 8 currently relies on an Adobe plug-in to display SVG which is likely to cause problems in the near future as Adobe is set to end support for the plug-in on 1 January.

In a statement Microsoft says the issue of SVG has not gone unnoticed: "SVG support is something that we have been evaluating for some time. We recognise the demand for vector graphics from web developers, and realise this is a high-priority demand."

Click here for our review of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2

Author: Stuart Turton