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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."
A proposed recommendation for possibility of consideration of partial inclusion...
Sounds like a novel idea, too bad I have no idea what they're talking about.
See also W3C XForms, which has just become a Candidate Recommendation (one step before PR). XForms updates HTML forms to be XML-based, and plays well with other standards, adding forms to SVG and other XML applications. There are already about a dozen XForms implementations, ranging from those for hand-held devices to standalone clients and popular browser plug-ins. (And a Bugzilla entry for Mozilla that is entertaining reading, though a link from Slashdot won't work anyway.)
Disclaimer: I am one of the editors of the XForms spec.
I heard that Redhat is planning to embedd librSVG (depends on some GNOME libraries) and GTK+ natively into XFree. Soon we have one standard Desktop on Linux, no halfassed things like XFree with bad Athena widgets and crappy configuration. We will get a complete reworked XFree with GTK+/GNOME support and new standards of libraries. You can read more about the plans on either the Redhat Mailinglists or the XFree development lists. A couple of GNOME developers are working on it already.
SVG is Scalable Vector Graphics. SVG is made in XML. It is easy to generate SVG. It is easy to export SVG. You can use SVG over the web like flash. You can use SVG to provide nice pretty scalable interfaces to web apps. SVG is more constrained and controlled than HTML. There is less likelyhood of incompatible features.
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Overview.htm8
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.
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.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Any unix apps around that will let you do interesting things with svgs? Like, VIEW them even? Why no mozilla support, even though a freely available implementation has been available since May 2001?
SVG looks uber-cool, but there doesn't seem to be much supporting software.
http://www.adobe.com/svg/demos/samples.html
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
It's good that a new recommendation is coming out, but people are still trying to get SVG 1.0 right.
For example, try http://www.croczilla.com/svg with your stock IE, mozilla or netscape 6. It doesn't work.
Adobe has an example to show their attempt at http://www.adobe.com/svg/demos/css_layout which only works in IE. But it takes up more CPU power to fade a new squares than flash does.
I am not sure if the world is ready for 1.0 much less 1.1.
I would give anything to go back to the html... All those new features... I would like to see html 2.0 and tables and that's it! People don't need anything else to put stuff on the web... Now you got all that fancy stuff, flash,... animateg gifs (ok, those could be tolerated) and all those things that make your browser choke and spit...
/.
;)
Use those 'new' shinny stuff somewhere else... We need something simple... I know that html alone is simple, but do we really need so many extension to it? Graphics, scripts, animations, whoknowswhatelse, FSCK! I need something that I can use to read HOWTO's and FAQ's and sometimes
Ah well.. I'll go back to bed.. feverish again....
The Sig, the sig
Corel just released an SVG viewer preview last week.
Here's a great page that compares SVG vs. Flash.
Here's two good reasons why you want to implement SVG instead of Flash:
SVG is a standard, Flash is proprietary.
SVG can be indexed and searched, Flash can't.
SVG can do more than flash. The only reason why everyone is not using SVG right now is because there are no "flash like" tools. SVG doesn't need to be "frame" bound like flash and has a better scripting language than flash (emcascript or javascript).
So SVG is better than flash, will be better than flash but currently it's tools are immature to compete head to head with flash but for instance if Macromedia was smart they'd provide SVG exporting of their flash stuff s.t they won't be thrown out of the market due to a new file format. Oh and don't trust the whack jobs supporting that PHP swf file format thing. That's a dead end, it's time to rely on something open.
Last week, Corel announced a preview plugin (Windows only, for now), so Adobe isn't the only game in town.
They also have a gallery with some neat SVG samples.
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.
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.
I had heard some rumors that SVG contained patented technology with which some organization was not going to play nice. Is this true? Or is SVG royalty-free?
Adobe has been distributing SVG viewer as part of the Acrobat 5 download for over a year now.
Nobody's waiting for Microsoft to innovate SVG or do their XDocs whatever thing; check these static examples generated from MS apps with SVGmaker: Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Project
For building SVG web applications its true that there aren't comprehensive IDE tools available yet, but that hasn't stopped developers from creating some definitive web apps with simple home grown tools (starting with a text editor since SVG is just XML).
Like this interactive logical diagram
Check this awesome mapping example
And this wonderful airport flight management app.
It is really here.
This is so good!
It is really here
This is so good!
This is a shameless plug but we are only 5 guys working out of a house, not a monopoly... (yet... ho ho ho). In the same way that Acrobat can generate PDF out of anything, SVGmaker can generate SVG out of Windows apps.
These are examples.
I have found such a PS file somewhere that can somewhat convert PostScript files to SVG. I have tried it on some graphics I created with MetaPost. It works except for the fonts, although the process is far from polished, so it is not for normal users.
Sodipodi uses SVG as its native file format.
It's great that SVG is XML based and supports scripting and such. Question is, what will be done in terms of security?
.smell my feet.
The lack of authoring tools for SVG may actually turn out to be an advantage. People doing Flash seem to be mostly using it for things that are very annoying to users, and they are often not doing it very well (that flashing, blinking web interface doesn't resize, for example). SVG may turn out to be a better and more acceptable format for vector graphics than Flash precisely because the people who shouldn't use it don't know how to anyway (of course, that blessed state will not last long--if it catches on, Macromedia will output SVG, too).
But until SVG becomes supported out of the box, with no plugins, by IE and Mozilla, it won't catch on much. Microsoft may support SVG in IE just to spite Macromedia--let's hope so. But it is incomprehensible to me why Mozilla has been so slow to offer SVG support: it already has all the XML parsing and graphics primitives built in--why is SVG support so difficult?
I hope my new iBook never gets infested (when i get it).
Everyone is talking about how SVG makes for a nice interactive site and will replace Flash/etc. as a nice defined standard. But what about audio? I didnt' see it mentioned in the specs... Of course SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics, but what will be done to handle synchronized audio on a web site? Will the old DOM and JavaScript take care of this? What about if I want an SVG-pure page?
Or am I missing something blatantly obvious in the specs?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
AdobeSVG plugin for Mozilla on linux works fine for me.
Filter
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"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
It segfaulted the browser (Phoenix--Mozilla based) in 5 out of the 7 SVG links I clicked on from the front page.
Anonymous Coward wrote: It could be months before it gets to that stage
The stages in the lifecycle of a Standards Track W3C specification are:
So it is being discussed because Proposed Recommendation means it has exited last call - which means there are multiple interoperable implementations and a test suite. Which means you can use it, now.
Chris Lilley W3C spec creation droid