Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

To date, SVG has been rather the Cinderella of web standards (people forget that Cinderella was the beautiful, but overlooked sibling before the whole glass slipper business). But since the handsome Prince (Internet Explorer 9) showed interest in her, things have been looking up. OK, so I’ve pushed the metaphor far too hard, but the long and short of it is Internet Explorer 9 now supports SVG as well (and arguably even better) than any other browser. So, as we’re actually big fans of SVG here at Web Directions, we thought we’d encourage you designers and developers out there to to play around with SVG, and win cool prizes (courtesy of the fine folks at Microsoft UK).

To this end, we’ve cooked up our first “No bit, Sherlock” competition, challenging you to come up with a progress control developed solely with SVG (ok, so you can style your SVG with CSS if you like).

All the details are at the competition site. The competition is open to anyone, anywhere in the world. You don’t need to install any software, swear an oaths of allegiance, or indeed, do much at all other than build that SVG progress control. Even if you’ve never touched SVG, you really won’t find it that challenging at all, and we’ve put together a pile of resources to help you get started.

So, if you’ve got an hour or two over the next week or so, you can get started with what’s going to be an increasingly important web development technology, and win some pretty cool prizes (including XBoxes, LEGO, Meccano, or even a tricked out SONY Vaio)