Sitepoint (Meitar Moscovitz) has an interesting article on SVG – SVG Is The Future Of Application Development. The blog item introduced me to the Sun Labs Lively Kernel project amongst other things. I have worked with SVG before – initially just making clipart in Inkscape, and more recently doing some geomapping. I found it clean and simple. Using SVG also meant I could develop my own tools for working with it which is what open standards is all about.

Which brings me to some of the comments on Moscovitz’s article. Some responses suggested that SVG was redundant because Adobe had shifted in another direction. The possibility of a single vendor abandoning a technology others have come to rely on is precisely why I think we should support open standards. We should support them in preference to proprietary systems unless the alternative is compelling (I have yet to find a good alternative to MS Access for some purposes, for example, but I am keeping an eye open). In addition to safeguarding against abandonment, using open standards increases competition in the tools space. MS IE 6 is an example of what can happen when a dominant vendor feels a lack of competition.

Other comments related to the lack of support for SVG in IE (for the foreseeable future). The argument was that if IE didn’t support it then there was no point using it. I don’t think it is that simple. IE is still dominant but there could be many cases where web application development could assume that a standards-compliant web browser would be used (e.g. kiosks; an intranet; a web application aimed at home users which the home users were highly motivated to use). Anyway, the future could surprise us. Who ever thought they would see Microsoft support ODF or portray itself as open-source friendly!?

I won’t be using this technology myself at this stage but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is something I need to add to my toolkit in 5 years time.