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VML has never really taken off, and few people seem to be using it. Given
IE's dominating market share in the browser market, and the tremendous
advantages of vectors over GIF/JPEG bitmaps, one may find this rather
surprising. It's too proprietary i suppose, and i don't know many
graphics/engineering applications that can output it - making it hard to
generate VML content without coding it yourself. As for the format itself
(specification-wise): dunno, we never really looked into it.
Microsoft developed and proposed VML as the web standard for 2D vector
graphics and implemented it in IE. Then the W3C - the non-profit web
standards organization who gave the world HTML and XML to name a few - put
together a working group to develop an open source standard for XML and the
Web, and they named it SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Represented in the
committee were obscure companies such as Adobe, Sun, IBM, Apple, Corel,
Netscape, Macromedia and yes, Microsoft. They've all promised support, with
Adobe being the front runner.
SVG is strongly based on Adobe's PostScript, and uses all the best elements
from Macromedia's Flash, Microsoft's VML and some other proposed standards.
Virtually everybody who gets exposed to it loves it, and our own lead
engineer thinks it's the best vector format he's ever seen (we just released
PostScript to SVG).
One of the favorite topics in graphics/web/vector land is predicting when
Microsoft will admit that VML is a dead duck and subsequently build in
standard support for SVG in IE. More and more people do want, demand and
expect both IE and NN to adopt SVG as the web graphics standard. Until they
do so, people can use free browser plug-ins such as the Adobe SVG Viewer at http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/main.html
The obvious advantage of VML for your situation: your IE 5.0 audience has
it, so they don't need any plug-ins. How are you gonna generate it though?
In PowerPoint? From scratch?
Peter Kleczka <pkleczka -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
> Anyone using VML? I thought this might be useful
> in some of our online projects since we currently
> write for an Internet Explorer 5.0 audience.
> I'm just beginning to learn VML and finding it
> semi-painful. So, I'm looking for any tips or
> hints that might help my learning process --
> or perhaps someone might even suggest its not
> worth learning.
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