IE9 Platform Preview Available - with SVG!
As the Official IE Blog notes, the IE Platform Preview is now available for download.
As a graphics enthusiast and a proponent of vector graphics (and fonts, and resolution independent UI in general) over the years I'm thrilled to have moved over to the Trident side of IE last year, focusing on Web Graphics. Specifically, I'm working with a bunch of great people to implement support for hardware-accelerated SVG in IE.
The IE Platform Preview gives a taste of what will be supported, but is by no means complete; it's essentially a snapshot of where we were at a certain point in time. This TechRadar article and the following table from Ars Technica's article give a good overview of the level of support that's been announced, and why. I won't elaborate on the what's and why's here, since I'm just a developer, though I will say that at around 800 printed pages the SVG spec is huge. :-)
| Functionality | Platform Preview | Internet Explorer 9 |
| Document Structure | Partial | Yes |
| Basic Shapes | Yes | Yes |
| Paths | Yes | Yes |
| Text | Partial | Yes |
| Transforms | Partial | Yes |
| Painting and Filling Color | Partial | Yes |
| Scripting and Styling | Partial | Yes |
| Gradients and Patterns | Partial | Yes |
| Clipping and Masking | No | Yes |
| Markers and Symbols | No | Yes |
| Filter Effects | No | No |
| Declarative Animation | No | No |
| SVG Fonts | No | No |
We're always looking for interesting uses of SVG on the web as well as applications that support or output SVG, so if you know any good ones leave a comment below or send me a message. (I'm particularly interested in highly interactive SVG -- stuff that goes beyond static clip-art style drawings.)
And now back to coding!
- Tony Schreiner