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Just keep an eye on http://svg.org/

I lead a large team working on AJAX apps at big corporation, I can tell you that building AJAX apps is much, much harder than any other UI technology I've dealt with in years. Can you build simple form-driven apps which are faster and more effective? Sure. But as soon as you stray from the path of least resistance [...]

The thing is, though, that you can actually cover a lot of needs just with those "simple form-driven apps". And the fact that webapps tend to be so simple and form-driven (at least in comparison to desktop apps) is in fact one of the reasons that unsophisticated users (and even quite a few sophisticated users) like them.

And if you take a serious look at those corporate AJAX apps you worked on, you'll probably find that in most cases it wasn't strictly necessary to draw a diagonal line. Although even that will become quite doable once you mix SVG into the AJAX soup.

Evrithing about SVG you will find in yahoo the newsgroup named SVG Developer: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ The SVG is also a W3 standard, so you will find the full spec on: http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/ Additional good information you get on http://svgx.org/ and http://svg.org/ The Microsoft stuff you can find under the keyword XAML.

Don't forget the cell phones. SVG Tiny would be a good way to get Google Maps access to a bunch of mobile browsers. If they can do it in VML, then it should be easy to do in SVG. SVG would be a whole lot simpler than the stuff they do for paths with PNGs in Firefox (imo).

Check http://svg.org/

"b) there is barely a drop of SVG on the web at the moment, and c) the major desktop browsers don't thoroughly, consistently support it"

This doesn't matter since we are talking about mobile devices. You won't see Firefox or IE running on a phone any time soon.

However, Opera aleady supports SVGT on their mobile browser and have great support in Opera 8 for SVGT. http://svg.org/story/2005/3/16/152318/005 (Mozilla also has a project, not sure it is for the full SVG spec or just SVGT.)

As for a, fonts are really the only thing that need touching up. (Unless you have a font engine built into the phone.) Have you seen SVGT on a phone yet? Or are you just speculating?

50 phones have SVGT 1.1 browsers built in and plenty more are on the way that will support SVGT 1.2. Vodafone is leading the charge. If you have Vodafone odds are something on it is done in SVG.

You forgot one of the most important things about new mobile phones... SVGT.

Over 50 phones now support SVGT and more are on the way.

http://svg.org/special/svg_phones

In the article they repeatedly mention the non-phone WiFi tablet Nokia has come out with but don't call it by name. I assume (from what I read on svg.org) that the 770 is what they're referring to?

Of course I have to use this chance to observe that this device supports SVG Tiny, as does Opera which they've embedded in other phones. Safari has no native SVG yet, but KDE/Konqueror has their implementation in KSVG. So it looks like Nokia is staying on that path.

.

Beatware Mobile Designer

Ikivo Animator

SVG smartphones shipping now.

BIG in the mobile world:
about a billion handsets can support it, many do out of the box these days. Services like MMS and Vodafone use it.

seriously used on the server-side:
Pictures sent to your browser, especially those from mapservers, could well be generated in SVG on the server only to be rasterized as a last step before sending to the browser.

graphics software:
"save as SVG" all over the place

browsers: support is gaining big, though even before often people were watching SVG without knowing, cause the Adobe plug-in came along with some Acrobat Reader versions.

etc.,etc.
get your perception more in line with reality

http://svg.org/ (community)
http://www.svgopen.org/ (world event)
http://svg.pagina.nl/ (links)

these services might not send you SVG, but:
-they might use it on the server and rasterize as a last step before sending it of to you
-there are services that do
-most modern mobile phones can do SVG, many even do out of the box (both MMS and Vodafone Live for example use it)

Check
http://www.svg.org/ (community)
http://www.svgopen.org/ (world gathering)
http://svg.pagina.nl/ (links)

Macromedia was gaining traction with selling Flash Lite players to mobile phone manufacturers. Adobe was competing by supporting an open standard, SVG with its mobile authoring tools.

Now Adobe eliminates this competitor by owning it.

But meanwhile, on phones, SVG is proliferating.

SVG is an open standard, XML, scriptable, event-driven UI.

Will Macrodobe support an oepn standard mobile web?

Or will it want developers to pay $xxx for tools to author content for the mobile web using formats it owns and controls?

it looks like a nice feature, which will be good, for both gtk and qt. looking at the Cairo site, it looks to serve a purpose similar to SVG, which used to be the big buzzword.
can anyone tell us, is Cairo in direct competition with SVG applications? i notice cairo advertises "high quality...printing outputs" - is that its focus while SVG deals more with graphic displays and the web?

A super versatile goodie.
Here's some explanation:

2D Web Graphics: SVG by I.Herman, W3C, Head of Offices.

Introduction to SVG

svgx.org

SVG.org

What is SVG

Yahoo svg-developers group

There's a lot more happening with SVG for embedded devices. Like all these phones.

SVG 1.2 is coming along, bringing with it the netowrking APIs and so forth to make it a more serious application platform. Though Adobe is typically quiet about new releases of their SVG plugin, work is going on in the background. After some licence owrries, Thomas is back working on Batik, implementing SVG 1.2 features.

SVG is getting big support from mobile vendors. See the list of shipping and upcoming phones that support SVG.

Found this entry on a blog at svg.org, a nice look at the shortcomings of Macromedia Flex's SVG coverage. Odd timing (Posted July 1), but it fits.

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