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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Microsoft and vector graphics (Was:XDocs and XForms?)
 <aside>Hurray! I can post to the list again! What happened?</aside> "Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@m...> writes: > Just my personal opinions, but here goes... > FWIW, remember that Microsoft happily supports JPG and GIF format graphics in many products FWIW, remember that GIF is a proprietory format and not a standard. > Anyway, it's not as if MSFT makes a strategy of being gratuitously incompatible with de-facto standards. In this case I doubt the fear of industry pushback would enter the picture nearly so much as simple pragmatic laziness. Why re-invent the wheel and try to create a market from scratch, when an existing new format is getting critical mass and beginning to represent an attractive market? > Why, indeed? Many Microsoft products beg that question, none more so than Outlook. I retained Andrew's message as quoted by Joshua as an illustration. There are two styles of quoting known to mankind outside Microsoft: prefixing every line with '>' or some other symbol(s) or attaching the entire message as message/rfc822 MIME type. Each has its advantages and disadvantages which are largely off-topic here. What puzzles me is that Outlook developers felt they had to invent their own, non-standard form of quoting. Don't like something in rfc 1521? Bring your issues up in IETF, I'm sure folks there would like to hear about them, and who knows, maybe work out a better and more interoperable standard. Other examples abound. What was wrong with references/in-reply-to headers? Is thread-topic better? Does it provide some enhanced functionality to MS MUAs? Good for them. But why remove the standard headers? Email is the most widely-used internet application (or so I hear). Rfc822/MIME is markup (extensible enough, just not Generalized). Outlook, at least in some versions, is given away for free. I want to believe there is some difference between Microsoft's policies re: email and re: web. Oh, and is there a way to make Outlook wrap lines? Or is "strong backing" for that feature missing in the Office group, too? Ari (expressing his personal, conspiracy-theoretic opinions). > > -----Original Message----- > From: AndrewWatt2000@a... [mailto:AndrewWatt2000@a...] > Sent: Thu 10/17/2002 1:20 AM > To: paul@p...; xml-dev@l... > Cc: > Subject: Microsoft and vector graphics (Was:XDocs and XForms?) > > > > In a message dated 16/10/2002 23:29:42 GMT Daylight Time, paul@p... writes: > > > > > We were talking about competition in the context of browsers. Microsoft > does not have the option of inventing a new vocabulary for vector > graphics. They could go the proprietary route with VML 2. They could go > the standards route with SVG. They can't develop something totally new > and proprietary without experiencing serious industry pushback. > > > > > Paul, > > In this sector I suggest that, in practice, Microsoft can do pretty much what it likes. They do have an option to develop a new vector graphics standard, whether they call it VML2 or something else. > > Of course, I would like to see Microsoft adopt SVG and implement it in Internet Explorer and in whatever the new generation browsers turn out to be. > > One factor playing into this is the, as I perceive it, threat to future MS revenues from the international move to open source software - either on economic or political grounds. Adding SVG to IE (which is "free") doesn't directly add to MS revenues. I suspect it would be tough, at present, for an SVG project at MS to get strong backing. I hope I am wrong. > > Andrew Watt 
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