TedPage: What is an SVG?

I mentioned earlier that I was disappointed with the Firefox 1.5 beta. It didn't have some of the SVG functionality that I use, and so I couldn't recommend it to people over the Adobe plug-in on IE. It is said that much of that functionality is already written, hopefully it will be in future betas.

But I'm even more disappointed with the response of the Firefox community to the bug I submitted on some files not rendering. Basically, the Firefox SVG renderer will not render the SVG without a proper namespace. Including the DOCTYPE or any other specification will not work, it requires the namespace. While I would entirely agree that namespaces are better, especially for compound documents, I don't put them in all my documents. When I write an SVG in VIM, I don't put in namespaces. They still render in Inkscape and the Adobe SVG plug-in.

I think what this argument generally boils down to is a choice between being more correct or being more useful. It looks like the Firefox team is looking to be more correct. Perl is popular partially because it doesn't require you to declare all your variables, allowing you to generate some pretty ugly but quick scripts. SVG will have a difficult time becoming popular if you always have to declare your namespace.