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SVG On the Rise
AShocka writes "The W3C has just released
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 and
Mobile Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1
as W3C Recommendations.
W3C Fellow Dean Jackson has an
article, on O'Reilly Network titled
SVG On the Rise,
in reply to Jacek Artymiak's article SWF Is Not Flash (and Other Vectored Thoughts).
Also check out Dean's SVG answer to Powerpoint presentations at Visualising the Semantic Web in SVG."
I'm not sure if SVG sucks yet since it's incredibly new and everything, but no one I know has used it.
In theory, it is a good idea, but it is only "widely accepted" (pronounced: "anticipated") by programmers who have been talking trash about Flash usability and want to play with vector art without losing face.
Stick to Flash until SVG picks up some steam. The World Wide Web Consortium has been very optimistic about it, promoting its native-ness in future browsers, but my money's on Flash until it gets all sorted out.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Basically, Adobe used an "unfrozen" API that changed between version 0.9.9 and the 1.0 release, breaking the plugin around the end of March 2002. The bug report contains an interesting back-and-forth between Mozilla and an Adobe developer, where basically the Mozilla developers admit that they completely fucked Adobe with their plugin interface.
(In order to allow scripting with the SVG plugin, they had to use some unfrozen interfaces. Although the interface that seems to cause the most crashes is the network code (nsHttpChannel), if I'm reading the crash dumps correctly.)
It's now 2003, and it appears that Mozilla has sucessfully gotten Adobe to say "screw this" and stop supporting the Mozilla browser all together. I'm hoping that with the release of the 1.1 SVG spec, Adobe will finally release an SVG plugin that works with newer Mozilla builds. But I think the tech evangelism team has successfully made that highly improbable by completely and totally pissing the developers at Adobe off, and this is highly unlikely.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Yes and no. Sure, it'll work fine for the majority of the web browsing public. But once browsers start shipping with SVG plugins (or just native support) by default, then so will SVG. No one is arguing that SWF is the more mature, and more widespread format at the moment. But what about the content itself? If it's all in SWF, then it won't appear on search engines, so you're far less likely to have visitors driven to your site in the first place. SVG content, on the other hand, will be picked up so that Auntie Millie will find her cookie recipe in Google, even if the site in question uses an animated cookie chef to convey it's information. Furthermore, she'll be able to get at the content even if she's blind and using a braille terminal, or if she's using her mobile phone. The same can't be said of SWF. I agree that Flash is a pretty good product, but it suffers from three critical flaws, which have prevented me from using it to date. Firstly, it doesn't degrade if you browser isn't able to support it. Secondly, it changes the usage pattern of a browser. You want to go to the previous page? Click the back button. You want to open a new tab? Press Ctrl-T. You want to search for a given string? Ctrl-F. But not in Flash. Admittedly, Flash MX has made some progress in that area, but it's still got a long way to go. Finally, search engines won't index Flash content. SVG remedies all of those deficiences, which is why I hope to see it succeed.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
You talk as if vector graphics are pervasive, yet overwhelmingly examples on the net can show where people convert vector graphics to a raster format (particularly charts, graphs, and maps).
SVG and web authoring don't mix, and why would anyone want to print Gifs or PNGs? Clarify please.
This makes no sense. In the real world most intranets now have HTML reporting functionality (with CSS printing layout), and users print this. SVG is another step in the evolution of that being a credible data information system for corporations.
I don't see what would stop Mozilla using an LGPL library. Even proprietary software can use LGPL libs so long as any changes to the lib itself are made public. And Mozilla certainly isn't proprietary seeing as it's mostly tri-licenced as MPL/LGPL/GPL itself. As all of the source of Mozilla is available via CVS anyone else can grab changes quite easily.
For instance, if the author creates a fancy animation routine as a Flash library and links it in the SWF, other Flash authors cannot easily copy that library and use it in their own projects. With SVG, however, being a pure-text human-readable format, what's to stop an author from viewing the SVG source and doing a cut-and-paste of the library into his own projects? From what I understand of SVG, there is nothing to stop unethical authors from stealing from the hard work of their more talented peers.
This is the one example where SVG's implementation in XML is actually a bad thing. And in my book, it's a huge disadvantage of SVG that Jacek Artymiak's article failed to address. Perhaps it's even the reason why SVG has failed to overtake SWF on the web.
I (and thus my company) have found SVG to offer compelling advantages over existing formats. This is in the field of presenting financial data. The main advantages seem to be:
.gif charts and .ps files, and it does very very well in this role.
:)
1 -- It's just XML. Whatever can emit XML can emit SVG, from a perl script to a huge j2ee system. Andthe perl script doesn't take long to write because SVG is a compact format that should be intuitive to anyone who understands scene graphs (and anyone else really).
2 -- It's scriptable and interactive. In fact, SVG has an object model that integrates with that of a web page. This makes it easy to provide interactive charts or SVG graphic elements that participate in navigation -- and they'll do the same thing whether they're hosted in a web page or in an application or whatever.
3 -- SVG is predictable and easy to handle. Bitmaps are horrible for presenting detailed technical data -- you can't zoom, you don't know how they'll print, you can't edit them easily when they're finished, they take up space. SVG is small, predictable, and can be 'fixed' by making changes to the text of the file.
4 -- SVG is accurate. It is easy to generate SVG according to precise algorithms and know that the SVG renderer will draw the resulting lines in a predictable way. You do not have scaling/rasterizing issues (at least not as much).
Overall, we have found SVG to be easy to teach, easy to distribute, and produce very good-looking and interactive results. I think it's a big, serious advance in presenting complex data, especially if you need to present it over the web or interactively. I do not see SVG as a replacement for Flash/other pretty picture formats, I see it as a replacement for
It's also a geek-freindly technology -- lots of cool filter toys, easy to integrate with your silly scripting language of choice. I love it
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
"proprietary
adj : protected by trademark or patent or copyright"
Proprietary doesn't always mean that it's closed to viewing. Just like PDF. But both are still from a legal standpoint "owned" by their respective companies. Patents and everything. So the answer is yes, SWF is a proprietary file format.