Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek

By, For and About Silverlight Developers

Silverlight and SVG

I've received the following question (in various forms) three times in the past two weeks, so I'm going to take the opportunity to post it and my response (such as it is) here.

SVG "... I  read that if Microsoft had supported SVG, this there would have been no need for Silverlight and that Silverlight is just a reinvention of SVG to protect Internet Explorer."

"The blogs say that Silverlight is just SVG reinvented to be owned by Microsoft"

My attempt at a reply usually boils down to something like this...

I never know how to begin to answer questions like this. If Silverlight and SVG were equivalent technologies, this might be a debate that some would benefit from, but I believe they are really quite different, serving different purposes.  Silverlight is an emerging technology in the spectrum of .NET tools for developing applications and I think you'll find that the appeal of Silverlight, strong as it is,  will be an order of magnitude stronger when we unwrap Silverlight 2 in a few weeks.

I don’t mean to dismiss your question; it is just not what I do; I’m best at helping folks learn and use Silverlight, not defending it in comparisons to putative alternative technologies.

 

 

Technorati Profile

Posted: Jan 31 2008, 10:15 AM by jesseliberty | with 3 comment(s)
Filed under: ,

Comments

caperaven said:

Just by the mere fact that he compares SVG to silverlight inicates that he has no idea of what silverlight actually is.

This brings me to the question if he even knows what svg is.

If we were breaking it down to xaml level then fine, lets talk, but to compare silverlight as a technology with something as simple as svg, tut tut.

My standard answer would be in the line of:

“Fruitcake, get a clue and them come and have an opinion.”

# January 31, 2008 11:50 AM

jesseliberty said:

A buddy added a few points in private correspondence that I'll summarize here...

* SVG is Scalable Vector GRAPHICS. It’s intended to be a method for rendering graphics, whereas Silverlight is about creating applications.

* Silverlight grew from WPF, which is why it uses XAML. Neither was designed to replace SVG.

# January 31, 2008 11:51 AM

heuertk said:

you can reuse svg assets as well: timheuer.com/.../convert-vector-svg-to-xaml-for-silverlight.aspx

svg is a great format, but silverlight also intended to have vector+behavior -- something svg didn't evolve well too

# January 31, 2008 12:24 PM