Starting with the General Election 2009 in Germany, the election maps on this site made use of the SVG Web library, that converted SVG markup to Flash for Internet Explorer versions 6, 7 and 8. Regional elections in 2010 and 2011 also got the legacy treatment. But already the size of the library was heavier than some of the SVG map geometries (see filesize analysis in my SVGopen 2011 paper).

The final straw came when I thought about a layout for the 2012 election in Schleswig-Holstein (click above for a first glimpse). Clearly this map shape would waste a lot of screen real estate when put into non-overlapping boxes as is necessary for the SVG Web shim.

So as a special kind of New Year's resolution to loose weight and get speedier I will drop shim technologies for legacy browsers from now on. Thanks, SVG Web, you have helped a lot of people in the transition period but now it's time to move on, to a fully standards-compliant web.

Labels: en, maps, svg, svgweb, wahlatlas