It seems to me that SVG has either not gotten appropriate recognition for its capabilities over the past 5-6 years, or that there is a lack of widespread adoption of it when compared to other technologies like Flash. When I look around at the status of various SVG design tools and viewers, it seems like a lot of companies have either slowed or stopped development. And with technologies like Microsoft's XAML coming on, I'm worried that SVG is going to get pushed out onto the fringe. It seems clear that Microsoft is about to enter the graphics world in a big way.

But who cares about Microsoft, right? What they're doing won't affect SVG. Well, to a certain extent that's true. But Adobe has purchased Macromedia and announced that it will discontinue the only SVG plug-in for Internet Explorer. So it looks like they are gearing up to go to war with Microsoft XAML in the vector graphics world, and my concern is that this may take the focus off SVG and possibly marginalize it over the next few years.

It is encouraging, however, that SVG support is still on the agenda for Firefox, and that Opera has relatively rich support as well. And Tiny SVG appears the be the only viable alternative for phone-based vector graphics. So hopefully, the Open Source community can continue to advance the technology while Adobe and Microsoft are fighting it out. But to do so, I think that SMIL animation must be put on the top of the development agenda in order to round out SVG browser support.

I only discovered SVG last year when we needed a vector graphics display technology for my company's application. SVG perfectly fit the bill and with its scripting support, I cannot understand why anyone would use Flash instead. Admittedly, I've only designed Flash on a few occasions, but its design tools seem to me to be very expensive; and it makes a great deal more sense to me to use a technology that is based upon a W3C standard rather than a proprietary one like Flash. Perhaps it is the past browser security issues and a lack of awareness about design tools that has prevented SVG from gaining wider acceptance.

In my opinion, it may have been a mistake to position SVG as a graphic design technology in the first place rather than a flexible, inexpensive presentation and development tool. I'm not a graphic designer, so I'm not really in touch with the trends in that industry. But there seems to be a lack of awareness about SVG among some graphic designers. Several of the ones that I know had never even heard of SVG when I asked them about it. And when I described it to them, most of them said that they would use Flash to accomplish what SVG does.

SVG's greatest value to me in my work as a software engineer is as a real time, easily-customizable, high-quality vector graphics rendering tool. I care very little about its graphic design capabilities; I leave that to the people who know how to do that best: graphic designers. As long as they give me a high-quality graphic, I'll render it in SVG in a way that fits my application scope.

Being a relatively new user, perhaps my observations are not well-founded. I welcome any opinions or comments.