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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.
Okay, so what are the best tools to use? I know Mozilla has an SVG plugin for _displaying_ vector graphics, but which drawing programs have good support for saving and loading in this format?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I hope this new standard has a compressed version like DisplayPostscript. XML is nice, but all of those chew up bandwidth.
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?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
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.
Random Musings
Appendix J: Minimizing SVG File Sizes
marotti.com
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.
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.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
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."
ort orAnimations"
in the Flassh/SWF world?)
(how fast can you say "QuickJugglingMarkupLanguageViaXSLTtoSVGAnimation
"myOwnSlideshowMarkupLanguageViaRubyOrPythonToVec
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
peace, love, respect
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.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but not a single current browser supports the format natively.
Most browsers did not support PNG's natively until their 4.0 versions. Tables until 2.0, etc...
Undoubtedly, incompatiable version of SVG format will make it into IE 6.5 or 7.0 and Mozilla 9.3.4... if Moz ever gets that far.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
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."
ort orAnimations"
in the Flash/SWF world?)
(how fast can you say "QuickJugglingMarkupLanguageViaXSLTtoSVGAnimation
"myOwnSlideshowMarkupLanguageViaRubyOrPythonToVec
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
peace, love, respect
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.
I know that we have actually been using SVG for some time on one of our production sites. But we have been looking into other alternatives such as flash generation.
So it's good to finally see that this might become a standard. Now, when will IE and Netscape support it?
I do everything the voices in my head tell me to...
To those who are predicting SVG's demise, I have several comments.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
Yeah yeah, SVG now an official recommendation.
Call me when mozilla supports it. Even stuff like CSS is still not used pervasively for web design, and how long has it been since it reached 'W3C Official Recommendation' status?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
PDF was never intended to be a format for displaying graphics in a web page, and likewise it doesn't sound like SVG is intended to compete with PDF as a format for books and articles.
but that format has become overloaded with gadgets and dubious features, the plug-in is enormous and invariably buggy
Just because Acrobat Reader 5.0, and the corresponding plug-in, are bloatware, that doesn't mean there's something wrong with PDF. By the same logic, Internet Explorer and Mozilla are bloatware, so there must be something wrong with HTML. The MacOS Preview app loads in a fraction of a second on my machine.
plus only works on a few platforms
What platform can't handle PDF? Windows, MacOS, and Linux are covered, although I believe only Acrobat Reader 4.05 is available on Linux, not 5.0.
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