Malcolm,

Thanks for the feedback!

>I did a prototype using VML a few years ago. Here's a quick summary of my experience:
>
>1. I couldn't find any real documentation on this technology. My solution was to reverse engineer the VML output generated when you export an Office document as an HTML file. The VML output by MS Office products is standard XML.

The W3C spec and MSDN seems to give me everything I need so far for the implementation. But then again I just started playing with it. I've been reverse engineering from a cool research project Microsoft put together for viewing newsgroup postings. I don't have the link handy at the moment I'll reply with it tonight or tomorrow.

>2. If you can design it in MS Office (Word, PowerPoint, Visio), you can export it out as VML.

I'll have to play with this to see what it generates.

>3. VML support is limited to Internet Explorer. And, I think, that's Internet Explorer for Windows only.

Not an issue it's an internal use only thing so I can force IE to be the required browser.

>4. I believe the industry "standard" alternative to VML is SVG. This requires a a free plugin from Adobe. The SVG specs are impressive, but the I found the Adobe SVG viewer bulky, slow, and buggy. Adobe may have also updated their viewer so you will want to verify this comment yourself.

I'm looking to minimize deployment issues so if it's in the box for IE that is a big plus. Also I dislike Adobe stuff.. the fact that the acrobat display engine hangs around consuming many megs after I've closed the pdf file really annoys me... which means I always taskman have to go kill it after browsing a pdf.

>I was very impressed by the promise of VML - its extremely powerful and Internet Explorer renders it VERY fast. But I was discouraged by the lack of documentation (a hint at Microsoft's opinion of the technology?) and lack of third party support. Working with VML can also be pretty tedious as its a very verbose and objects can be layered many levels deep.

Fortunately the tedium can be reduced by a little bit of method code to abstract back up to a higher level of code.