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."

Comments

Adobe SVG does crash Mozilla 1.x

[_xeno_]

Actually, the Adobe plugin does not work with any 1.x version of Mozilla. It's bug #133567, which you can't access via a link from Slashdot. It's been in the release notes for some time, seeing as there are many people who both use Mozilla for standards compatability and are using SVG as a emerging technology. Of course, now they can't do the two at the same time.

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.

Re:For idiots like me -

[Tet]

Macromedia Swiff (.sfw) format is NOT closed source, and you have a better chance reaching your audience with it.

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.