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.

Comments

Re:Tools?

[disc-chord]

Adobe GoLive 5.0 and Illustrator 9.0 are the choice options for professional development.

I've been playing with GoLive 5.0 for about 2 months since I first heard about SVG and I've played with Illustrator. I'd have to say I prefer GoLive 5.0... but only slightly. If you already have a PhotoShop license get GoLive. If you don't have a Photoshop licesne get Illustrator.

Re:Tools?

[crisco]

On Windows? Tons of tools. On the high end, Adobe seems to be embracing SVG, possibly as something to break Macromedia's stranglehold on .swg. Their Illustrator has support for SVG and they are probably the ones doing the most to effectively promote the format by distributing a SVG viewer plugin with the Acrobat 5 reader. Corel Draw and even Macromedia's vector drawing tools also support SVG. Going a bit easier on the pocketbook, JASC software has done work on a tool to do SVG and I believe there is a very nice free tool to do at least basic vector drawings.

On the Linux side of things, there is something called Sodipodi that has great promise as a SVG tool, unfortunately it isn't close to being done. Kontour has support for SVG. There are also a myriad of command line tools for conversion from other vector formats.

Want links? start with the DMOZ category.

Its in the spec, Appendix J

[hodeleri]

Appendix J: Minimizing SVG File Sizes

Start SVGing!

[Boiotos]

Browsing SVG

The only browser plug-in for SVG right now is Adobe's, and it only works in NS4 and IE5 for Mac and Win32. However, there is a rapidly-developing Win32 SVG-savy branch of Moz by Alex Fritz. No text support yet, alas, but the author suggests that it should be easy to port to other platforms.

Generating SVG

Sodipodi is a Win/Linux vector graphics program with SVG at its heart -- well worth a look. Sketch runs in Python and includes SVG in its import/export set. I've had good luck transforming complex Illustrator diagrams into SVG using Sketch.

On the Win platform, I'm quite fond of Jasc WebDraw; it's in beta and a fully functional demo is provided.

Finally, the versitility of the Batiklibrary is staggering. Written in Java, it includes a viewer, transcoders to png and jpg and a very cool Graphics2D implementation. The latter allows anything graphics that can be drawn to a java G2D panel to be instead output as SVG. This is a great way to get font dimension info for precision layout of SVG, as we've done building dynamic timelines at the Historical Event Markup Project.

Re:Tools?

[bherzog]

My vector drawing program Sketch also has some SVG
support, although the SVG import/export filters are still incomplete,
unfortunately. The program itself is quite usable, though. Since Sketch
is Free Software, help is always welcome, of course.

Re:Finally!

[psavo]

check out mozilla, 5 months ago I loaded some build and there was svg-enabled one. I'd bet it has matured by now.
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/mozi ll a0.9.3/mozilla-win32-0.9.3-MathML-SVG.zip could be the one.. (linux version somewhere there..)

Re:Why not FLASH SWF?

[tobi_pinkjuice.com]

Would any of you use Dreamweaver without being able to view and edit the source? So why would anyone create vector animations in Flash without being able to view and edit the source?
SVG code is a little verbose, but very human readable. Check out a preview version of WebDraw: http://www.jasc.com/webdraw.asp One can also view source of online SVGs; fun.

It's XML, so parse/manipulate/generate it with any of your favourite XML tools in any of your favourite programming languages. XML content can be transformed to visual versions for different environments.
(how fast can you say "QuickJugglingMarkupLanguageViaXSLTtoSVGAnimation" or
"myOwnSlideshowMarkupLanguageViaRubyOrPythonToVect orAnimations" in the Flassh/SWF world?)

Since dynamic generation is so convenient, and SVG is a truly high quality format, you can internationalize and personalize content without too much fuss, using all the open source technologies that don't even have to know about SVG. It has Unicode, it's own font format, is searchable and indexable, and works well with CSS, XSLT, RDF, later SMIL and XForms. I'm trying to avoid the word "professional", but don't succeed.

Give it a try, check the spec (not to say RT*M)), and basically have great fun.

The spec: (pretty readable)
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/
W3's SVG page:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
More links: (mine)
http://www.pinkjuice.com/SVG/SVGlinks.htm

Since it's XML, you can transform it!

[Lally Singh]

Actually, one of the best features of SVG is that it's XML. You can generate some XML data from a database, transform it into SVG (possibly with also with a template) via XSLT, and then render it into a graphic file (like JPEG or PNG with Batik).

And support is pretty good -- XML libraries are bountiful, and reading/writing SVG won't be too painful (now knowing what to do with that data once you've read it is another story....).

Pretty cool stuff in my opinion.

Re:Finally!

[vondo]

Check out these two bugzilla bugs for how SVG support is coming along:

Initial request
and
Actual work.

This is to get SVG into the main develpment line, it seems things are mostly working in branches.

Mozilla also has quite good PNG support.