ozmanjusri's Journal: Mozilla helps modernise IE

Ars Technica is reporting that Mozilla developers are trialling a new plugin that adapts Mozilla's implementation of the HTML5 Canvas element for Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Canvas is used many popular web applications but it hasn't gained widespread use because it isn't available in Internet Explorer. Despite this shortcoming, web developers have begun to find workarounds to allow equivalent functionality for IE users. Google had to develop ExCanvas to make their Maps available to IE users, for example. ExCanvas works around the limitations of IE by re-implementing much of Canvas' features using VML, Microsoft's proprietary version of SVG. Mozilla's plugin will make it unnecessary for future web developers to create their own libraries.

Mozilla also has plans to develop a plugin called Screaming Monkey, which will allow IE to use Mozilla's JavaScript engine directly, meaning developers can code to web standards, not IE's proprietary "quirks".

It appears that even if Microsoft can't or won't make Internet Explorer a modern web browser, the computer industry is finding workarounds.

Huh, what?

[symbolset]

VML, Microsoft's proprietary version of SVG

Calling VML a version of SVG is sort of like calling POVRay a version of LOGO. Both comparisons differ in the number of dimensions displayed. Neither of these things is anything like the other one. Fortunately the error is in the article and not in your post.

Re:

[ozmanjusri]

Both comparisons differ in the number of dimensions displayed.

I suspect you're thinking of VRML, or Virtual Reality Modeling Language.

VML, or Vector Markup Langauge was Microsoft's submission to W3C as a proposed standard [wikipedia.org]. It was rejected in favour of SVG, but MS used it in IE anyway.

Re:

[symbolset]

Caught me out.

/ slinks away...