Collaborative web whiteboard based on the SVG technology

Apart from SVGWeb, other methods have been used over time to bring SVG support also on Internet Explorer. The methods were mainly two: either to use one of the many available plugins or to develop a sort of double headed model which may produce VML in place of SVG when support for the latter is missing.
In the case of the use of a dedicated plugin, to require an installation on part of the user is a strong limitation for a technology whose distribution must grow starting from very low market share; using SVGWeb, instead, the newcome technology benets from the diusion of a more mature product.
The double headed model, on the other hand, was used with more luck. The VML (Vector Markup Language) was one of the standards, proposed to W3C for web vector graphics in 1998, which were not accepted but whose structure was taken as inspiration to build SVG. It was proposed by Microsoft and it is always been supported by Internet Explorer, so, due to the similarities between SVG and VML, some conversion tools and some development techniques have been used over time to produce applications relying on SVG/VML. It is easy to see, however, that this approach is not confortable nor convenient for developers, and it cannot compete against the advantages oered by concurrent technologies.
A better solution is to use VML but hide its use through a transparent library layer, which does the conversion from SVG to VML in a way similar to that used by SVG Web when converting from SVG to Flash. This is the choice adopted by the Ample SDK5, a rich framework which provides clientside portability with regard to many client side aspects, not only SVG. The example pages for this library state that multiple quirks may be observed, however this looks like the closer alternative to SVG Web, since it allows to use standard SVG within the application code.