So Microsoft made great promises about how Internet Explorer 9 would comply with all the standards and, in particular, add support for SVG that has been totally absent in IE before, but is increasingly well supported by other browsers.

A new era of open-ness from Microsoft with regards to web technologies ? Well not really: first off getting a preview involves all the usual microsoft twists and turns, and then it seems support for the standards falls somewhat short.

One of the key features of the standard open technologies is how they interoperate and provide extensibility, but while the IE team might be working hard to implement much of the standard (and are to be applauded for doing so), the key extensibility features of SVG (the <foreignObject> tag, that lets you then put HTML or similar within an SVG document, much as you can put SVG within an HTML document - http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/extend.html) is not supported and, according to bug 571625 in the bug database (I'd post a link but guess what, it's not open to public view, you have to have an account AND then apply to be able to view it) it's not supported by design (for the common reader, this means that they know of the feature but have made a concious decision that they will not implement it).

quote: "The issue you are reporting is by design. Internet Explorer 9 does not support the forgetObject [sic] element."

Now that's the funny thing about standards - to implement a standard you have to implement it all... you can't pick and choose. You're allowed mistakes, oversights, accidental omissions, differing interpretations of ambiguous details etc but you can't just say "I don't like this bit and I'm not doing it". Especially when it comes to key items like extensibility that are designed to make sure that a standard can be built upon and, well... extended.

If they'd said "Oh, that feature's a bit of a biggy, we've not really done that much on it yet, and what's there is a bit buggy so it won't be turned on for this beta/preview", or provided some limited implementation, then I'd understand.

But when a bug reporting the problem is closed with "Not a bug - behaviour as per design" then that's very different.

Some might read all sorts of interpretations into this... I'll leave that to them