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SVG Now a W3 Recommendation

Posted by michael on from the macromedia-trembling-in-boots dept.

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.

4 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Finally! by maggard · · Score: 4, Interesting
    At long last we've got an officially blessed vector format.

    I'm sick to death of getting maps and charts as honking big ugly GIFs. They invariably come off looking poorly on screen, printing them out only makes their 72 DPI origin more uglily apparent, and just suck up bandwidth. Finally at 256 colors and without embedded gamma they're always off visually to some large percentage of folks.

    PDF's were touted as a replacement but that format has become overloaded with gadgets and dubious features, the plug-in is enormous and invariably buggy plus only works on a few platforms. Also aside from Apple creating their own implementation for MacOS X (Quartz) I don't know of any second source for the technology other then Adobe.

    SVG is far lighter weight and far more accessable, now the question is when will decent plugins arrive and how soon 'till support is built-in to the major browsers? Adobe's SVG plug-in just went to v.3beta for a few platforms but I've been unable to find anything open (in either sense) or more cross-patform yet.

    Finally my fear is that SVG will become like PNG - a great format that's poorly supported in differently broken ways so it's just not worth the hassle. Does anyone have any insight on how easy/hard SVG support will be to roll into tools & browsers, what producers of such tools timelines are?

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  2. CAD vectors? by digitect · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Does anybody know if SVG addresses CAD vector files? If not, could it be adapted? It sure would be nice to have a "blessed" standard other than the proprietary (AutoDesk's AutoCAD) .DWG.

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  3. Re:Why not FLASH SWF? by maxdunn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Andreas Neuman has a pretty great summary of the differences between SVG and Flash. I know if you have any suggested changes to this he'd welcome feedback. I think it clearly shows the superiority of SVG in the long term: the only current obstacle to SVG is the installed base of browsers/viewers.

  4. Re:Tools? by reg · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Not a drawing program, but one that I'm sure will find very wide use is GNUPlot. The CVS versions (http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuplot/) have a SVG terminal. I've not tried it yet, but I'm hoping to use it in a project where I need high quality graphs on a web page. I noticed that in the latest GhostScript/GSView under windows that one of the conversion options is PS->SVG via the GNUPlot driver...

    Regards,
    -Jeremy