End of Our SVG Era
Users of our service should now notice that something is different. With the latest release, we've dropped Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as our default format for charts for PNG. The marks the end of an era of our unwavering support for this bleeding edge technology. Some times we take chances using certain technologies and those chances work out -- it saddens me that this chance didn't have the envisioned return.
Why SVG in the first place?
When I used to demo the product or talk with technology folks, I would frequently get blank looks when I espoused our usage of SVG. Let me explain myself.
We are a SaaS-based company that's selling to an audience very accustomed to desktop applications. It was our belief, and still is, that people like products that are sexy and interactive. It's hard in a web browser to duplicate the interactivity and user experience of a desktop application, but we wanted to employ as many technologies as possible to make this happen -- SVG was one of them.
We, like many others today, use AJAX and thought that SVG was a perfect fit. SVG is a full vector-based graphic language all based in the DOM. You can treat any part of the drawing as an element in the DOM. It's fully standards-based and Firefox, Safari, and Opera all support native rendering of it. What's not to like!
Upon making the decision to use it, we invested deeply in the technology. We hired an expert and member of the W3C working group. We conceived and sponsored the SVG logo contest ( the winning logo is proudly displayed on our login page ). We developed and then open-sourced our SVG charting library which had a fairly broad support for charting plus had annotation capabilities.
Early feedback from users and prospects was very positive for the SVG charts. We received many "oohs" and "aahs", so we were pleased with our choice. Later we continued to commit to SVG with our choice of BIRT as a reporting engine which supports SVG as an output for charts.
What happened?
As time elapsed, it became harder and harder to justify support SVG despite the "oohs" and "aahs". First, for IE users -- which of course is >60% of our users -- it meant they needed a plugin to see any charts. Then Adobe announced that their support for this plugin will be discontinued. So while I believe that IE will one-day support SVG natively, it's not worth causing any delay with customers or prospects.
For those that did have the prerequisites to see the SVG charts, the more SVG we had on a page the slower the page seemed to get. Given browser performance of late, we cannot afford to have anything in our content that slows down the browser -- especially when there are viable alternatives.
So despite the visual superiority of the technology, we had to drop it as the default option.
What's Next?
We haven't completely abandoned SVG, and we'll continue to support it via our usage of BIRT. However it will not return as the default option for images until it overcomes the aforementioned challenges. We hope that Microsoft will join the other browser vendors and include first-class support for this great technology in an upcoming version of IE. And we hope that the performance of browsers and rendering engines will improve so that SVG users are not punished for choosing it.
NOTE: if you miss SVG, you can turn it on via your Settings page. Enjoy!
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