Several readers have written to me over the past while, asking for an update to an article that I wrote for the July, 2003 issue of MSDN Magazine. In that article, I expressed a lot of optimism for the future of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). However, based upon how the market has evolved since then, and the amazing clarity of hindsight, I have come to believe that SVG is effectively dead as a mainstream, desktop technology. To many this will be a painfully obvious fact, but I thought it had to be addressed (and it allows me to respond to queries with a courteous link). 

SVG, as a quick primer, is a vector graphics technology that allows for gorgeous layered designs using basic primitives. SVG also offers a wonderful DOM programming facility to allow for animations and programmatic alterations - I won't go into SVG in technical detail (not only are there plenty of resources out there that do, but I also don't pretend to be an expert in SVG), but I will say that in a nutshell SVG is a standardized, owned-by-no-one alternative to Flash: With a simple XML layout and clear, logical specifications, SVG was compelling in its approachability and low barrier to entry - No special authoring kits, or understanding of convoluted binary formats, was required to begin creating dynamic, vector-graphic solutions.

Nonetheless, based upon some observations and occurrences since, I will confidently state that SVG is dead on the desktop:

• Adobe has been the primary sponsor of SVG since the outset, and many believed this was largely to undermine Macromedia's Flash
• Adobe, whose plug-in viewer is by far the #1 method of client-side SVG rendering, hasn't meaningfully updated their viewer since 2001
• Corel also created an SVG viewer, but it too has completely stagnated, and that element of their graphics strategy has faded
• Even the Apache Batik project has largely stalled
• Macromedia released the Flash File Format Specification, undermining one of the primary selling points of SVG
• Flash is ubiquitous
• Adobe acquired Macromedia for $3.4 billion in a deal that was approved on August 24th. Flash is an absolutely critical ingredient of Macromedia's business model. Adobe didn't put $3.4 billion towards something they plan on killing
• The remaining push for SVG seems to be for the mobile market, but even there Flash is making headway
• I was sure then that the open standards SVG would be heartily adopted and evangelized by the open source community, and I felt certain that mainstream, native support for SVG would thrive in Mozilla cum Firefox, giving it a killer-feature to take on Internet Explorer. What SVG support exists today, over two years later, is still just a fork that is described as a "technology preview"
• Microsoft is going to capture hearts and minds with XAML, and with tools like Microsoft Expression (which doesn't, to my knowledge, support SVG).
  

These, along with other factors, have led me to believe that SVG on the desktop is a non-starter, barring some jarring schism in the marketplace. I think it's too little, too late for Firefox to offer a wide deployment of SVG, and I doubt Adobe is going to do much more than let SVG fade away (of course they'll claim otherwise, but let's be honest).

I do, however, continue to believe that SVG on the server, as a component of the image processing pipeline, is still entirely viable.

[UPDATE: A followup can be found here]