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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.

6 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Tools? by crisco · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

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    Bleh!

  2. 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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  3. Its in the spec, Appendix J by hodeleri · · Score: 4, Informative

    Appendix J: Minimizing SVG File Sizes

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    marotti.com
  4. Start SVGing! by Boiotos · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:Tools? by bherzog · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:Why not FLASH SWF? by tobi_pinkjuice.com · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

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