Vector Markup Language

~ the eulogy ~

On 13 May 1998 a handful of companies sent the W3C a note proposing an XML language for two-dimensional vector graphics on the web. Microsoft was the name that mattered on the submission, with Autodesk and Hewlett-Packard among the others. Five weeks earlier Adobe and Sun had sent in a rival called PGML. The committee did what committees do with two good proposals and started a working group, which produced Scalable Vector Graphics instead. SVG became a W3C Recommendation in September 2001.

VML lost the standards fight in 1998 and then had the longest career of any losing format of its generation, because Microsoft shipped it regardless. It arrived in Internet Explorer 5 in 1999 and in Office 2000, and it stayed in every browser release through Internet Explorer 9. For roughly a decade, if you wanted a line drawn by the browser rather than by a GIF on a server, and your users were on Windows, VML was the one that worked.

Development of the format itself stopped in the autumn of 1998, a few months after the submission. Nothing was added after that. It simply kept being supported, which in a monoculture is the same thing as being alive.

I never chose it and never wrote a line of it by hand, which I suspect is true of almost everybody who shipped it. It turned up in files. Save a Word document as a web page in 2002 and the markup came out full of tags in a v: namespace that no other browser understood. Turkey ran on Internet Explorer 6 well past the point where that was defensible, so the chart on some bank's intranet rendered for everyone in the office and showed nothing at all on the one machine running Firefox.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it looked like ~

The syntax was a namespaced tag set you dropped straight into the HTML. A shape was a v:shape element with a path attribute holding a sequence of coordinate commands, and fills and strokes were child elements rather than attributes on a canvas. It had no file extension of its own, which tells you what it was for. The graphic was part of the document, written into the same file as the text around it.

Google Maps used it. Version 2 of the Maps JavaScript API drew its polylines with VML when the browser was Internet Explorer and with other machinery everywhere else, which is how route overlays worked for the Windows majority between 2005 and the v3 rewrite. Microsoft published a VML to SVG migration guide in March 2010, two years before pulling support, which was the clearest signal the company ever gave about where this was going.

~ the day it stopped ~

Internet Explorer 10 shipped with Windows 8 on 26 October 2012 and did not support VML in standards mode. The compatibility documentation was blunt about it under the heading "VML is no longer supported", with the advice being to move to SVG. The format stayed available only in the document modes that emulate Internet Explorer 6 through 9, for pages nobody was going to rewrite.

~ still twitching in your inbox ~

VML is not actually gone, which is the strange part. It survives inside Office Open XML, where it is written into ISO/IEC 29500 Part 4 and described in the standard itself as deprecated and present for legacy reasons only. Open a .docx or an .xlsx and you will find vmlDrawing parts handling things like the little boxes that comment balloons live in.

The stranger survival is email. Outlook for Windows renders HTML mail with Word's engine, and Word's engine still reads VML, so people building commercial email in 2026 are still writing v:roundrect by hand to get a button with rounded corners, and v:fill to get a background image, wrapped in conditional comments that only Microsoft's mail clients read. The new Outlook renders with a web engine and ignores all of it. A format that lost a standards vote in 1998 is still being typed by hand in 2026.

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