Browser SVG and Visio Support

While putting together some technical documentation, I started to export a couple of visio diagrams to image files. I thought to myself - "I wonder if browsers natively support the SVG format yet?" A quick google search told me that Firefox 1.5 and later supports SVG out of the box.

I uploaded my visio diagram and ended up with the following:
XML Parsing Error: prefix not bound to a namespace

Rather than just stop there, i decided to read the FAQ. I noticed two problems right off the bat - my web server didn't have a mime type associated with svg, so I edited my mime.types file and added the following:
image/svg+xml svg
I also noticed that for firefox to support the svg file, the following namespace had to be referenced:
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"

Zip. Zang. Zoom. An image appeared in my browser! Not a good one, though. I opened it in IE and it rendered fine - even without the namespace edit.

Here is a screenshot of what firefox gave to me:

And to my surprise, IE gave me a much better looking image:

Notice in IE not only is the text not jumbled, but it also produced the arrows that firefox apparently missed. I suppose it's not too difficult to imagine a Microsoft product supporting Visio diagrams a little bit better than a Mozilla product would. IE does not need the additional namespace, although I'm not sure if the mime type is necessary or not. IE does have it's own set of problems however.

The SVG image I was working with was larger than my IE window and it did not produce scrollbars. I suppose I could have managed to create some by embedding it in a web page and playing around a little with CSS or maybe even an iFrame tag, but since cross-browser support doesn't truly exist just yet for visio SVG files, it's better for me to try an alternative format. I also noticed that the Zoom In and Zoom Out functions that I typically see with Flash were present - which lead me to believe that maybe IE doesn't natively support SVG and that the support comes from my flash plugin. Nope. My IE SVG support comes from an Adobe SVG plugin which now I'm remembering that I installed because Urchin Stats had an SVG button that I wanted to play with. Hmph. (by the way, I'm using IE 6.x)

Well, the conclusions are the same - cross browser SVG support for Visio diagrams isn't there yet. I did end up checking file sizes and quality over a number of different formats and in this particular case, gif ended up winning. I also found that I could save another 4-10k on the file sizes if I opened up the image in Fireworks and exported out to gif again.