The tragedy of Macie SVG – the deliberate indifference of Microsoft and Adobe to web graphics

A major part of my scientific work appears to have been condemned to rot in the dungeons of the Web because of the failure of large vested interests to try to work together.

5 years ago I created a tool for animating enzyme reactions ( a computer generated movie of how molecules are transformed in an active site). [co-workers Janet Thornton, John Mitchell, Gemma Holliday and others. (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/thornton-srv/databases/MACiE/).

It was well ahead of its time. For 1000 reactions it generated the coordinates and made a smooth transition between them. I believe that if it had been taken up by the biological community we would now have a better understanding of this subdiscipline. I had hoped to show it at a talk I’m giving later this month in Biochemistry in Cambridge. So I went to the EBI site and found:

The Animations [in MACiE]

The animations are automatically generated from the raw CML as scalable vector graphics (SVG). Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond our control, these currently only work well on Internet Explorer and Avant with the Adobe SVG plugin, which is available from adobe.com. Whilst Firefox and some other browser do support SVGs, the do not seem to currently support the animation elements. This seems to be a case of Adobe removing support for browsers other than Internet Explorer from their software. We will continue to try to resolve this issue.

We are currently aware of problems with the following browsers:

• Firefox 1.0.7 and 1.5
  
• Opera 8.53
  
• Netscape 8.1
  
• Konqueror 3.1.3
  

My work can no longer be shown to the scientific community because Microsoft and Adobe are not prepared to adopt W3C recommendations. I hold them largely responsible for holding back community science based on graphics. Perhaps by as much as 5 years or more.

Because there is no simple enduring way of creating semantic graphics that we can rely on. And non-semantic graphics (mindlessly adopted by publishers) destroys information.

I have been through about many 5-year cycles of graphics which look like the following:

• Stop whatever you are doing
• Pick a new emerging graphics technology
• Try to learn it
• Try to install something that works on your machine
• Try to create things that work on other people’s machines
• Start telling the world how wonderful it is
• Find that the technology disintegrates or is torpedoed.
• Go to 1.

For the record this includes Calcomp80, Tek4100, GKS, Phigs, GL, Tk, SVG, WPF, etc. Although some of these are still around you have to be a geek to get them installed and used on a given machine. (Some might work on a particular platform but try, say, getting WPF running on Linux – or in Firefox).

 

I saw SVG as the great white hope in 1997/8. I hailed it as the universal graphics platform for the web. I saw it as the first killer app for XML-over –the-web.

 

In case you don’t know, SVG is Scalable Vector Graphics. Read about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics. And agree that it will do what the web needs for most graphics. It’s a W3C Recommendation (i.e. quasi-standard). It’s got the additional advantage that it’s one of their recommendations that:

• Is well-thought out
• Works
• Can be understood by mortals
• Is widely implemented

In the original phase it was enthusiastically supported by Adobe. They built a great viewer. A really great viewer. It’s not easy to build an SVG viewer. And they made it free. You could install it on Internet Explorer.

 

But not Open.

 

It didn’t run on Firefox. But we could hope. After all Adobe was pushing it.

 

However Microsoft wasn’t. They had other graphics languages (sic). Microsoft often has more-than-one-way-to-do-it. We have encountered this problem. In Chem4Word we had a choice of graphics. Visio, Silverlight, some-VL-that-I-can’t-remember, WPF/XAML, etc.

 

But not SVG.

 

Because SVG doesn’t work natively in IE (or Office). It is tolerated in that it can be included in (say) Powerpoint without crashing it. But it doesn’t use the semantics.

 

Why didn’t MS support SVG when it was launched in 1998? I don’t know. The marvel is perhaps that they did support XML. And we have Jean Paoli of Microsoft to thank for that. Together with Jon Bosak (Sun) they got joint sponsorship from the two companies to sponsor XML. And given that this was in some of the darkest days of Microsoft hegemony and monopoly we should thank Jean for this. Think what would have happened in XML had split into XML and MSML.

 

I have called this “The tragedy of SVG” because Adobe slaughtered its child, with Microsoft callously looking on. Those two bear the public responsibility of having destroyed 10 years of progress in layout graphics. Ten years of mindless adoption of PDF and closed Word binary documents.

 

We are reduced to scraping dead PDFs to try to extract something slightly better than rubbish. The companies fully understand the issue of interoperability and they choose to compete instead.

 

Science suffers.

 

Nobody likes seeing their work destroyed. Choosing a W3C recommendation 5 years after its adoption seemed a reasonable way of going forward seemed a responsible thing to do.

 

I shan’t give up. There is a small glimmer of hope. Not the microcheer for Microsoft announcing that 12 years after SVG’s launch it might include SVG at some time in a future IE hoped launched this decade:

On January 5, 2010, a senior manager of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft announced on his official blog that Microsoft had just requested to join the SVG Working Group of the W3C in order to “take part in ensuring future versions of the SVG spec will meet the needs of developers and end users,” although no plans for SVG support in Internet Explorer were mentioned at that time.^[61] During Microsoft’s MIX 2010 developer conference, it was announced that IE9 would support SVG 1.1.^[62]

But there is more hope from the Open community which I’ll mention later.

 

I have copies on the material and it may even be in our Institutional repository. But if the EBI no longer expose it there is no point in preserving something that has been asphyxiated by inaction.

 

But I shan’t let myself be depressed.