SVG 1.1 Becomes W3C Proposed Recomendation

openbear writes "From the w3c web site... W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 and Mobile SVG to Proposed Recommendations. Comments are welcome through 20 December. SVG delivers vector graphics, text, and images to the Web in XML. SVG 1.1 separates the SVG language into reusable building blocks. Mobile SVG re-combines them into two profiles optimized for cellphones and pocket computers."

Comments

Linux implementations

[raju]

The first place I would expect SVG to appear in is the browser. In Mozilla the beta SVG provided by Adobe does not work. Mozilla's own implementation[mozilla.org] is stuck due to licensing issues (LGPL vs MPL). When can we expect a decent one on our beloved platform? Windows users at least a decent one from Adobe.

So is this going to replace Flash?

[bogie]

Flash is the dominant method used for interactive graphics on the web today. Websites, adverts, those little games, all have standardized on Flash. In fact although I wouldn't mind it, I can't picture the internet without Flash anymore.

So my question as a non-developer is can SVG do everything Flash can? I didn't see anything about audio capabilities. Also does anyone think even if it can, are the tools there to make using SVG as good as the tools for making Flash graphics. Lastly is SVG a good working spec that won't be co-opted and ruined by some big company.

Re:So is this going to replace Flash?

[Anonymous Coward]

The big difference between SVG and Flash is that SVG is an open specification, not one which is the property of a big company, Macromedia. Although there's never a guarantee that a big company will ruin its specification (HTML by Microsoft for example), it is not likely. SVG itself doesn't have audio capabilities, but SMIL has. In SVG you can incorporate SMIL to use audio. SVG has also some problems. It's XML, so it's text. This means that it can be quite a lot of data you have to send over the net. Or you can compress it (only zipping method which is supported by the 1.0 recommendation is gzip, this can have change), but then it should be decompressed. After this has been done, it should be parsed by the SVG viewer (like adobe's). Although there's still more support for SVG, there aren't much viewers available for SVG in browsers. Even Adobe's viewer hasn't been updated in a year! But on the longer term I'm sure SVG will be much larger than Flash. Macromedia was keen enough to jump in the hole when there was need for vector graphics. SVG came too late to make it as successfull as Flash instantly. I think the fact that Macromedia owns Flash, while SVG is an open, public standard, will make the difference.

Re:So is this going to replace Flash?

[IamTheRealMike]

SVG is getting wide adoption in mapping technologies. I used it to implement a selectable, zoomable map at work a few weeks ago. The XML base of it made it a lot easier than working with Flash would have been.

Re:So is this going to replace Flash?

[uhoreg]

SVG doesn't have audio capabilities because audio isn't, well, vector graphics. You can add audio, though, by using SMIL, another W3C standard. Or you can once someone supports SMIL. (RealPlayer supports SMIL, but AFAIK not SVG.) I suppose you could also probably use some JavaScript stuff to get audio.

Re:Nice to se Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

Corel just released an SVG viewer preview last week.

Re:svg-capable apps?

[sjbrown]

For simple viewing, there's librsvg, but for really fun stuff, there's Sodipodi

(among others, I'm sure)

Re:SVG for OSS Fonts

[wombatmobile]

Embedded vector fonts are part of the SVG specification.

Here's an example.

To create SVG fonts, print anything with SVGmaker.

The free demo creates fonts you can reuse in your own SVG doc.

Re:svg-capable apps?

[wombatmobile]

SVGmaker generates SVG from standard Windows apps using File/print, like you do with Acrobat to make PDF.

But SVG is more compact. For example, this PowerPoint presentation is 140kb as compressed SVG, compared to the original PPT which was 950kb.

Re:SVG vs. Flash

[tshak]

Here's one good reason why you'd want to implement Flash instead of SVG: SVG is Slooow.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very excited about the possibilities for quick and _relatively static_ XML based graphic generation. But for an extremely slow animation SVG hogs my CPU @100% on an Athlon 1.2Ghz.

SVG + script = Enterprise web app

[wombatmobile]

An SVG document can be UI for enterprise applications integration.

For example, start with this static picture generated from a CAD program.

add some simple polygons and script them to conform with some business logic. Connect to your enterprise applications and databases using various connectors (simulated here) and you get a UI component like this that integrates with HTML.

Click on components to select them.

Ctrl-Click to select a set of components. Move your mouse over the colored components to highlight data in the html table.

Type a number in at the top right [enter] to see if you have enough components available for manufacturing.

This example was coded by hand in a day and a half. Probably could do another one in 3 hours or so now we got the hang of it.

Magnificent airport management example

[wombatmobile]

Sorry, I got the URL wrong for Hugh Enxing's magnificent airport management example.

It is really here

This is so good!

Re:SVG VS FLASH

[foniksonik]

Flashscript is no longer the end-all be-all for swf format. FlashRemote supports many server side languages and has excellent support for XML and SQL.

I have been intrigued by SVG ever since it made it's appearance on the scene but the SVG guys seriouly need to make a leg and get moving on authoring tools which support the full gamut of capabilities, ie: this hand coding crap just won't fly in a work flow process or even for JoeAverage doing something for school.

Anyways Adobe has an SVG plugin and you can export any vector + variables + code from illustrator and GoLive as SVG. Still not an authoring tool like Flash though. Macromedia bought and innovated their way to the top of multimedia authoring a while ago and Adobe is still playing catch up in a lot of ways (coming along nicely though).

Re:SVG vs. Flash

[FooBarWidget]

You mean Flash isn't slow? The Flash plugin it takes 10 to 20 seconds to load, and when it's finally loaded, it hogs 90-100% CPU! And I'm using an Athlon 1.4 Ghz.

Re:SVG vs. Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

10 to 20 seconds to load? Something must be wrong with your system cause it shouldn't take that long. Now the movies can take forever to load because a lot of people make bad flash movies.

Re:pointless until widely supported in browsers

[chris_lilley]

SVG support has been a difficult issue in Mozilla because of the rich canvas. As you say, the XML parser and DOM and CSS parser and inheritance and XLink simple linking and JPEG and PNG and ECMAscript are there already.

The Mozilla SVG project started off by using Raph Levien's rendering library libart, which is only licensed to be used under the terms of the LGPL and not the standard Mozilla MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license.

So, that licensing issue held up getting SVG code into the trunk, and when it was in ther trunk, stopped it being in the core builds (it was there in CVS and could be enabled at compile time). It worked on Linux, MacOS, Windows, etc - it was very cross platform code but there was the licensing issue.

A new approach is to split the rendering code into platform-independent and platform-dependent parts. A test of this approach is available from the croczilla site (which has a bunch of great examples too) - there is a build that uses the GDI+ renderer suplied with Windows 2000/XP. Clearly, this avoids the license issue o the rendering library and clearly, it means there needs to be a separate platform layer for each supported OS (darwin on MacOS X, perhaps different linux layers for Gnome or KDE, etc)

I know the Netscape folks are aware of this, too, because I visited Netscape and gave them a demo which included Mozilla SVG among other things.