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SVG Now a W3 Recommendation
Bob_Juanita writes: "The W3C has finally made the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format an official recommendation." I'm looking forward to this - SVG looks to have a lot of potential for web development. Easy, dynamic, scalable graphics from database data - nice.
The Effects of a W3C SVG Standard:
Positive: Flash plugin will eventually no longer be needed for vector
graphics as a key set of vector standards will be integrated with browsers.
Ensuring that fonts are on the users system will no longer be an issue.
Font embedding can be standardized.
Negative: Netscape and IE will both bring "enhancements" to the base SVG
models. Of course none of those "enhancements" will be present in BOTH
browsers. IE will allow for basic SVG 3d shapes, though no applications
will currently support the creation of those shapes. IE will also allow for
very loose coding to create the SVG shapes. If you accidentally put a
single co-ordinate set into your file, IE, instead of telling you that there
is a stray point. Will assume that you wanted to create a MSN logo and
subsequent link to MSN.Com. Microsoft Word will support SVG export,
including in the source file a bunch of code that noone has any bloody idea
where it came from, what it is supposed to do, or how to get rid of it.
Thirteen years later, Microsoft will take over the US Government and we will
find out that the "miscellaneous code", has been stealing our personal
information for years. Microsoft will call it "A bug". Netscape, on the
other hand, encountering a stray co-ordinate pair, will assume that the
"clean-coding" standards of the internet development community are going
straight to hell in a hand basket and that the world is coming to an end.
"That being the case," it will logically decide, "this poor bloke is about
to meet his maker and doesn't need to be squandering his last few minutes
with his peepers fixed on a computer monitor now does he? Best he be off to
the local pub for a pint or two while he still has the chance". Netscape
will them proceed to crash your operating system. Netscape will also do
wonderful little tricks like incorrectly display circles as parallelograms,
Render every font as 16 point Times New Roman, and completely leave out the
bottom half of your document for some obscure reason that you will spend 13
weeks trying to track down before you finally come to the conclusion that
"There really aren't that many Netscape users out there anyway". AOL will
just compress the heck out of everything it encounters and render every SVG
image as a Dot.
Insignificant: Someone somewhere on a UNIX machine will be writing Plain
Text news articles about how SVG is the worst threat to web usability since
the invention of JPEG compression. They will urge the development community
to avoid SVG because compatibility will still not be standard across all
computers. They themselves will be ample proof of this fact only because
their 28.8k external modems will not facilitate the download of the newest
version of Netscape (God forbid a UNIX user should install IE) and even if
they could get it installed, their 16mhz 1987 computer wouldn't know how to
run it. The general population will promptly ignore these articles as they
click yet another accidentally generated MSN logo link, leaving the insecure
author to return to Usenet and his IRC client.
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