I got an excellent email from Ruud Steltenpool offering another perspective regarding the current state, and future, of SVG. I think this topic deserves a balanced treatment, as many of the readers here are only partially aware of what SVG is or how it applies. With Ruud's permission, I've included the exchange below (this was just casual banter between us, so manage expectations of perfect grammar and structure accordingly. The email starts at the newest message, going back through my reply, to Ruud's original email).   

-----Original Message-----
From: Ruud Steltenpool [mailto:svg @ steltenpower.com]
Sent: September 15, 2005 7:01 PM
To: Dennis Forbes
Subject: RE: SVG is Dead! Story at 11!

Thanks for the reply Dennis, (just call me Ruud) and a very good day to you too.

Go ahead posting, even though i found some things that could've been written  a tad more elegantly and some typos, i don't think it really needs changing.
And here are a few more somewhat loose bits:

The executive summary is very much about money.
SVG is about freedom of creativity...... , [[[[[sidestep example: SVG is a great way for 'coders' and 'clickers' to cooperate. A 'clicker' just hits "save as SVG" in their own favorite graphical tool and generates something a coder can easily work with in their own favorite editor. Some coders can actually think of things that look good, but can't handle a pen/brush/mouse and some are amazingly good at realizing the idea through coding instead]]]]]] ............... which makes SVG a tough sell.
It's related to that not many people know/understand/believe that you can actually make money (some companies are making loads of money actually) with free software. My attempt at grasping it http://steltenpower.com/OS4entrepreneurs.pdf

Nobody really puts a marketing budget behind SVG (yet), cause nobody owns it, nobody directly makes money off selling SVG. So no millions of dollars making sure we all hear about every 'superduper fantastic major' product the technology is used in. Perception is indeed important. Many people for example think that anything that moves in a website is Flash. Some of those just blindly clicked "Accept" once and are watching SVG instead some of the time. And with all major browsers except for IE doing some or a lot of SVG out-of-the-box now or very soon, there will be a lot more people thinking Flash while looking at SVG. Things are changing though, for
example: Though many brands are offering phones with SVG pre-installed, only just recently Sony Ericsson was the first to decide to actually mention it to their customers in the description of the many models.

Good thing you mention Google. I've used it extensively for anything related to SVG. And in the last year and a half a lot has changed on the web. First you would find a lot of the 'SVG is perfect for everything and will change the world tomorrow, starting with bringing world peace' kind of articles written years ago. Though these articles are still there they are a minority now. What i keep finding is articles on a very broad spectrum of subjects, with somewhere between the lines saying SVG.
Sometimes with "(Scalable Vector Graphics)", but usually nothing more than those 3 letters, no explanation, nothing. I think that really says a lot, it's used as nothing special, as the natural way to go.
And more specifically on Google, they used to not index SVG-files: now they do. And the Open Clip Art Library probably gets a lot more traffic since. On Google Maps: Jim Ley just showed on svg.org how to get SVG in Google Maps.
Google might just add SVG, probably silently. Maybe a bit after Mozilla
1.5 final (it's in beta now), or what about the mobile market, that is more bandwidth-limited ?

And on raster images being good enough: Often they just are, nothing wrong with that. SVG can and will also be used for things that are just plain annoying, the things we have Flash-blocking extensions for. And of course some of those rasters are already being created with SVG and if based on browser-sniffing they are partly replaced with the original vectors not many people will immediately notice it.

SVG sneaks up on you, no big bang, no explosion, though the hype years ago tried to make us believe so.

I'm not so sure of Adobe moving away from SVG. Microsoft will definitely try some usurping (don't forget many, many people use ancient versions of Windows, so don't expect to see things changing fast on that end. Just as with SVG, things just take time), but will have a hard time, even more when Adobe turns up a plug-in that does SVG+Flash+PDF tomorrow :-)

As you would like to have this 'discussion' appearing on the web, get yourself some more traffic with posting a link at svg.org

Regards,

Ruud

On Thu, September 15, 2005, Dennis Forbes said:
A very good day to you Mr. Steltenpool! Thank you very much for the
feedback
- it is very much appreciated.

Firstly, let me say that I love SVG - I think it is an elegant,
extraordinarily powerful, vendor-neutral solution. When I write about
my perception of its demise (or continued irrelevance), I don't do it
out of malice or dislike of SVG, but rather sadness at the way things
have turned out. I think SVG is one of the most underrated technologies out there.

Outside of that, my work schedule and focus has definitely been in
places other than SVG for the past while, so the truth is that I'm not
entirely attuned to all of the happenings in the SVG world. Instead
I've been watching the "Executive Summary" version of the happenings
in the SVG world.
E.g. while there are lots of small progressions and improvements in
the world of SVG, from outside looking in, it is a technology that
completely stalled. I absolutely believed that SVG should have
EXPLODED into the marketplace years ago, enabling a whole new
generation of dynamic and gorgeous interactive web elements, but
instead here we are today with an SVG use and saturation largely where
it was (or declined) three or four years ago. The market is seldom
rational, and it looks like most developers (who are the ones who
would drive this sort of technology) saw Flash, or even raster
graphics, as "good enough". I completely expected the open source
community to go nuts over SVG, and to embrace and adopt it
pervasively, but instead the SVG fork of Firefox (I've been trying it
on occasion for a couple of years) has been maintained and embraced by
just a couple of people, and many in the open source community simply
have a "bah, Flash is good enough" attitude. Now that Adobe is
inevitably going to continue to turn away from SVG, and Microsoft is
going to usurp the vector graphics community with their offerings, I
think the window for SVG to make a bang has passed.

I entirely agree that the flash specification in no way equals the
openness of SVG, and the restrictive clauses are onerous, however my
point was that it is "good enough" for many developers. Already when
advocating SVG I've been met with retorts that the Macromedia spec is
"open" as well.
Perception
matters more than reality, and the perception is that Flash is now an
"open"
standard.

At this point, the only way I can imagine SVG really making a serious
impact in the marketplace, and to become a general technology, is if
Google adopts it. If Google Maps, for instance, used SVG as the
underlying technology, it could catapult the technology. That's pretty
speculative, though, and I don't think Joe WebDev can rely upon that
when deciding on technical platforms.

BTW: Do you mind if I post your comment to me, and my reply to you? In
fact if you reply to this with corrections and clarifications, I will
post the thread from your reply on, giving you the last word.

Thanks and have a very good day

Dennis W. Forbes

-----Original Message-----
From: Ruud Steltenpool [mailto:svg @ steltenpower.com]
To: dforbes@yafla.com
Subject: SVG is Dead! Story at 11!

Dear Dennis,

On http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/2005/09/13.html :

I read an article on your website with the same title as this e-mail.
I'm not sure what you mean with "Story at 11!" (maybe cause i'm not a
native english speaker), but my best guess is "11 a clock" where 12 a
clock means really the end of SVG and my second best guess is that
it's some sort of expression meaning that you're joking.

Cause it is somewhat funny that your article shows up almost exactly
at the same moment as yet another big and important step in spreading
SVG even more. I am typing this in webmail from my Mozilla Firefox
with standard native SVG rendering, that was released just days ago.

It sounds like you're not very aware of how much SVG is being used in
the world. Some of your remarks are at least inaccurate:

Batik just introduced sXBL implementation (just after your article
though)

Flash is not as ubiquitous as MacroMedia likes to make us believe.
I believe it's on a lot of desktops, and i believe a lot more (than
SVG) BROWSERS are equipped to play Flash through a plug-in, but i
don't believe these numbers. "Lies, damn lies, statistics" And SVG is
used in lot more
places: big applications using it through Batik or other toolkits, KDE
using it for icong and wallpapers, Inkscape, the OpenClipArtLibrary
and Scribus getting more popular by the day for a reason.

Didn't you see that the Flash File Format comes with a restricting
license?

And on Adobe, well Kurt Cagle blogged on that very nicely:
http://www.understandingxml.com/archives/2005/08/on_adobe_svg_an.html

The mobile market is huge and compared to SVG, the use of Flash is quite
.. ehm..  Tiny :-)   Even though MacroMedia might be screaming all sorts
of things of the roofs (i don't know if that is a real expression in
english), i see more and more SVG phones showing up, really in the
hands of people, and services of for example Vodafone, the biggest
provider in the world, using the functionality.

Microsoft will indeed keep capturing something for quite a while, but
someday they have to start indeed capturing hearts, cause people are
starting to only spend money on things they fully like (and combining
with other tools is just too great a feature to miss).

And on the server, there we'll be running XAML to SVG transformations.

It's just the "open" movenment, a big force of cooperation, that
MacroMedia , Microsoft or whatever company cannot stop. They're
welcome to join though
:-)

Anyhow, i hope you're happy to hear this good news on SVG. Your
article managed to get me away from coding some SVG actually :-) That
will have to wait till tomorrow cause i'm falling asleep.

Maybe see you at SVG Open 2006? I'll buy you a drink

Ruud Steltenpool
organizer of a well-attended, fruitful and fun SVG Open 2005