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

A what now?

[ejdmoo]

A proposed recommendation for possibility of consideration of partial inclusion...

See also XForms

[leighklotz]

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.

Re:See also XForms

[Anonymous Coward]

There are already about a dozen XForms implementations, ranging from those for hand-held devices to standalone clients and popular browser plug-ins

How many of these implementations support the UPLOAD form control?

Why do you expect browser authors to implement XForms when they don't even implement the ACCEPT attribute of HTML's INPUT TYPE=FILE element?

Disclaimer: I worked on XForms for most of 1999.

SVG

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:SVG

[0x0d0a]

It would be even nicer if there were Linux graphic editors that could export SVG...

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?

[ergo98]

SVG isn't going to replace Flash anymore than Flash is going to replace binary games (i.e. We're not going to play Doom 3 as a Flash game): Each has its place. Having said that, in some situations SVG will supplant Flash were it's a better choice: For instance for charts and graphs the vector graphics capabilities of SVG are absolutely first-rate, and it's unnecessary to resort to a proprietary tool such as Flash when dynamically generated XML will work stunningly. The SVG standard is extremely comprehensive even in its 1.0 form, so I don't see very many ways that it can be coopted by anyone.

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:Awesome

[bluFox]

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is XML specification for creating Vector graphics (It can be embeded in html pages)

SVG can be used like flash , and you can use javascript to manipulate the shapes on page.

See batikfor an apache implementation of it and some examples (quite nice ones) , and adobe provides a nice viewer for the svg too..

The good point bt vector graphics is that it is scalable , and sizing of images do not affect the clarity/sharpness of the images

---

Let's not get ahead of ourselves here...

[DraconPern]

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.

SVG vs. Flash

[Cheese Cracker]

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.

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.

Re:SVG vs. Flash

[Khalid]

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

I am not sure what this really means. This is like saying XML is slow, or better HTML is slow. SVG is a standard, you will have slow, and quick implementations, maybe current implementation have not been really optimised yet, but there is no real reason SVG might be intrinscly slow

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:Quick Info

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard that Redhat is planning to embedd librSVG...natively into XFree

• 1. It's not RedHat, it's a former SuSE employee;
  
• 2. it's a server extension;
  
• 3. it's not SVG, although it can be used for rendering SVG. Or PDF. Or PostScript. Or whatever.
  

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.

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.

Re:Quick Info

[KeyserDK]

This guy is clueless beyond imagination.. Anyway..

The Xfree86 stuff he is getting riled up about is probably this
While the gnome/gtk stuff is here and here
How he mixed it together is - impressive.

No, SVG is real now

[wombatmobile]

The 1.0 spec has been out for yonks already and there's an active SVG developer community out there.

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.

Like PDF but its XML

[wombatmobile]

SVG is an image format that can faithfully reproduce a document display context, same like PDF but since SVG is XML you can mark it up by hand in a text editor, script it, transform it, integrate it directly with HTML or whatever you like. And no monopoly controls it.

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.

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).

Sodipodi

[cyba]

Sodipodi uses SVG as its native file format.

Re:Quick Info

[EzInKy]

Wow, I was half joking and you seem to be spoiling for a fight, lol.

Linux is what you want it to be...you want a point and click OS with easy installs, no problem use KDE and front end to apt or rpm.

But, since you are an A+ computer student, wouldn't you agree that it is important to understand what is going on underneath that pretty GUI to make all that magic happen?

Let's suppose that you've graduated and have your degree. You land a lucrative job and are happily going about your work until all of sudden one day something goes wrong and your machine won't launch the desktop. What are you going to do?

Now don't you think you'd look pretty silly having all that sheepskin hanging on your wall proclaiming you a computer expert, yet you can't even edit a simple command line script to fix your own computer?

Re:Awesome

[WowTIP]

Now, hold your horses.

Saying that Gnome uses SVG extensively is an exaggeration at this point. The only use of SVG in Gnome so far, is for rendering icons on the desktop and in Nautilus. There are plans for letting other UI elements be SVG based to, but they are just plans. If you plan using SVG icons as desktop icons you also better make some PNG renderings of them too, if you want the same theme in the panel and menus, since you can't use SVG there yet.

Also, Nautilus SVG renderer seems kind of incomplete in one way or another. SVG images that works in Sodipodi, Adobe viewer, Illustrator and Mozilla SVG, renders incorrectly in Nautilus. Wrong colours, missing gradients.

And, Scalable Gorilla isn't an example, it is the only SVG theme available. A very nice looking theme though. :)