Microsoft's Patrick Dengler, a senior program manager on the Internet Explorer team, revealed this week that Microsoft is joining the W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) working group. In a post on the official IE blog, Dengler says that Microsoft hopes to collaborate on future versions of the SVG standard.

This move reflects Microsoft's growing involvement in the industry-wide effort to advance open Web standards. Internet Explorer has a notoriously bad track record on standards compliance and interoperability, but Microsoft is gradually remedying these issues and has been attempting to engage more productively with the standards community. The company took a big step last year when it began participating in the HTML 5 editing process and expressed support for HTML 5 audio and video elements. Joining the SVG working group is another big step forward—one that will likely be welcomed by Web developers.

Microsoft's browser supports its own incompatible XML-based graphics format called the Vector Markup Language (VML), a vestigial precursor to SVG. Web applications that use complex vector graphics typically have specialized code paths for generating VML for Internet Explorer users while using SVG for everyone else. This significantly increases the complexity of using vector graphics in Web applications and makes SVG impractical to use in many cases. If Microsoft were to implement native support for SVG in Internet Explorer, it would eliminate those challenges and enable ubiquitous adoption of SVG.

It's important to note, however, that Microsoft has not yet committed to implementing SVG—though that seems like a likely outcome. The company's announcement on Tuesday indicates only that it plans to participate in ongoing efforts to refine the SVG standard.

"As a part of Microsoft's continued commitment to interoperability and standards support, yesterday we submitted our request to join the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). We're excited to take part in ensuring future versions of the SVG spec will meet the needs of developers and end users," wrote Dengler. "We recognize that vector graphics are an important component of the next generation Web platform."

Microsoft's Silverlight framework for rich Internet applications (RIA) supplies its own mechanisms for browser-embedded multimedia and vector graphics, but the SVG standard and the HTML5 audio and video elements provide compelling vendor-neutral solutions that are widely supported in other browsers. Microsoft's growing support for these standards could potentially be a sign that the company is softening its Silverlight strategy and positioning its proprietary plugin as a complement to Web standards rather than a competitor.

Microsoft's evolving position on Web standards is undoubtedly influenced by pressure from the rapidly growing popularity of Firefox and Chrome. Emerging standards like HTML5 are gaining broad traction and could start to see significant adoption in next-generation Web applications. If this phenomenon leads to a trend of popular Web services blocking Internet Explorer users or giving them a severely degraded experience—much like what Google has done with Wave—it could rapidly degrade Microsoft's browser marketshare by giving users a bigger incentive to switch to alternatives. It seems like Microsoft has realized that it risks losing its relevance in the browser market if it doesn't strengthen its support for open standards.