"But it sounds like the guys at Google have done a lot of work, and the community's done a lot of work to find a way around that for now. I think that in the future, IE is definitely going to be supporting it," Sterndale said.

Also backing SVG was a presenter from Wikimedia Foundation, maker of the Wikipedia Web site.

"We've been using SVG very heavily on Wikipedia because it gives us a standard format for graphics, which can be edited by multiple people," said Brion Vibber, CTO of the foundation. He added that browser support is up to snuff on pretty much every browser but IE, though SVG Web helps.

"Until we have native support in IE, we have something almost as good," Vibber said.

Neuberg said Canvas 2-D Web drawing capability is also sought for IE. Canvas is part of the HTML 5 specification, of which Google is a big supporter.