The Fall and Rise of SVG
"Rather than embracing SVG as an alternative, Microsoft pursued a blatant copy of Flash in their too-late-to-the-table Silverlight effort."<p>The author seems to have missed, apart from an initial mention, VML out completely. VML was Microsoft's SVG alternative in IE 5 through 8, not Sliverlight. Sliverlight was a Flash alternative.<p>VML, although badly documented, can/could do much of what SVG can do, in a few cases it does it better. It was also pretty complete with IE 6 in 2001. SVG had the first very basic version in Firefox 1.5 at the end of 2005, and needed Firefox 3.0 in 2008 before you could say it was reasonably complete. MS thought they had a head-start and could win the vector battle.<p>The key thing, as well, with VML is that it was built into IE natively. Getting Adobe SVG or Sliverlight added onto IE into large corporate environments was near on impossible. We, fortunately, decided we didn't trust Adobe prior to them killing the IE SVG plugin and were running fully on VML at that point.<p>The last 10 years of my working life have been based around SVG and VML, my co-founder and I would tell you a similar story. Especially, regarding word-wrap in SVG, it's our top pain point as well. It forced us to use HTML as foreign objects in SVG to get word wrap. Of course, IE never supported FOs, Edge has only just added it.