Vector Graphics On The Web?

Rob asks: "Bitmaps take up valuable bandwidth and are displayed at different sizes depending on your screen resolution, but Flash animations are big and clunky. Will the increasing take-up of alternative means of browsing (PDAs, mobile phones, TVs, ...) with corresponding variations in screen display and connection speed lead to the emergence of a compact, widely used standard for vector graphics? What are the obstacles which need to be overcome? What vector formats are already in use on the Web?"

Comments

SVG

[Trongy]

The world wide web consortium (w3c) has anointed
the xml basd svg (scalable vector graphics) format.

http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Overview.htm8

Adobe are supporting SVG.
They have a browser plugin to view svg graphics for windows and mac. (Mozilla also supports svg)
Adobe's drawing products have svg output.

http://www.adobe.com/svg/

Some other links:
http://www.blackdirt.com/graphics/svg/

http://sis.cmis.csiro.au/svg/index.html

Re:See also the /. article

[Matts]

Please note that the W3C does not publish standards, it publishes recommendations.

This is a common and easy misunderstanding to make.

In defense of Flash

[JonK]

Flash (by which I take it you mean the .SWF file format rather than the authoring tool) isn't necessarily 'big and clunky': the original format (packed bitfields within objects, objects byte-aligned within the file) is, in many ways, pretty well thought out: it's a nice balance between compactness of representation and speed of rendering, although its use of quadratic Beziers makes it a bit of a pig to draw circles, arcs etc and its text handling, by being user-agent-neutral, requires the programmer to jump through hoops, and it's got several advantages: most importantly it's an open format, it's widely supported and it's broadly standardised. It may not have the imprimatur of the W3C, but it's useful.

What tends to make it big and clunky is the habit designers have of embedding bitmap images into the .SWF either intentionally or unknowingly: the worst offender in this regard is Adobe's 'Flash-killer', LiveMotion which does some really evil things to generate .SWFs - from what I've been able to extract from LiveMotion-generated .SWFs, it seems to flatten all the layers it uses internally into a single bitmap and then stick it into the .SWF as is which is, unsuprisingly, somewhat inefficient.
--
Cheers

RFC 965

[SEWilco]

You might want to look at RFC 965 "A Format for a Graphical Communication Protocol"

The main goal of this paper is to lay the groundwork for the development of a vector graphics format to be used as a basis for an on-line graphical communication protocol. We call such a format an "interactive graphical communication format," or IGCF. In this section we describe some operational requirements and usable characteristics for an IGCF.

What about photos?

[Mignon]

Vector graphics are great for producing scalable "cartoon-like" images, but what about photos? I thought I read once that fractal compression of an image allowed it to be reproduced at arbitrary scales (with an upper limit of its original resolution, of course.) I wonder if wavelet compression has a similar property. Does anyone know?

Incidentally, I think Kodak was once promoting an image file format/server software combo that would provide several levels of resolution, depending on what the client asked for. AFAIK, it didn't take off.