Design Challenges

Vector on the Web

So, there is a small company on the west coast called Adobe, they produce a wonderful product call Illustrator. Illustrator is the number one vector base tool for creating graphics, the problem is that the designer has to render it to bitmap format to put the images on the Web.

Then came flash, a product originating from a small company that got guzzled by Macromedia, which is know part of the aforementioned Adobe. This tool became quite popular among Web designers and developers as it allowed for vector images to be render directly on the Web and played by a small plug-in that comes standard with most modern Web browsers. This plug-in further allowed animation to also be rendered on the Web.

Microsoft, in their great competitive wisdom, came out with their own tools. The took the popular vector engine embeded in powerpoint and word and translated it to the Web in the form of Vector Markup Language (VML). VML is an application of Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 which defines a format for the encoding of vector information together with additional markup to describe how that information may be displayed and edited.

Because VML is xml based it allows for readability by most browsers than can read xml. This was a major breakthorugh as Web designers could take their html and xml foundation to quickly and easily create vector graphics on the Web. The problem is that vml never really took off as most people are anti Microsoft.

The bottom line is that as designers we have to be open to new ideas, even if we don't like the company who is producing the tools. I like to try everything technology I can, and expended a few days looking at VML recently and found it to be very useful and see a lot of potential here. To learn more visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/VML/