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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."
Does anyone know whether Macromedia Flash can export to SVG or - if not - any such features are planned for a future version?
Good kudos to Macromedia if they would.
As all graphics are vector based, SVG also has the potential to provide crystal clear, high resolution print-outs instead of the blurred GIFs (or PNG if anyone cares) we get to today.
SodiPodi is an SVG editor for Linux and (recently) Windows. It's not complete yet, but from the look of it it should be pretty good when it is.
Ho hum for the life of a bear
I took a quick look at SVG for a proposal. It required animation with syncronized audio narration so SVG wasn't a possibility. I still don't see that SVG supports this and can't imagine SVG to be even remotely as useful as SWF in the realm of multi-media presentation. Sure it makes sense in more technical applications like mapping or calculated interactive diagrams, but I don't fear we'll be subjected to a rash of slow-loading SVG page banners any time soon. Bit of a shame, actually.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
Lets start with disadvantages. Not many browsers support SVG in it's current form. Somehow the plugin is tied to Adobe, which the call the "recommended viewer". (Read: No rock-solid native browser support in IE, or in Mozilla/Phoenix)
.swf with Flash, and that's not the case. Now that you can import SWF into major Presentation titles, there is no reason why SVG could be of any use.
No widespread use. (Yes, I don't give a fuck if W3C is their mothers collectively endorse SVG, it was even dead before it got invented). Macromedia Swiff (.sfw) format is NOT closed source, and you have a better chance reaching your audience with it. Some people confuse
As for advantages, it's based on XML spec, but then again, not everything that carries the name XML is something to go nuts over.
In conclusion, I've been hearing how SVG was going to EXPLODE onto the web and portables in the next few years, and it never happened. That's what people were saying back in late 90's.
There is a Mozilla project working on SVG support, but it's not yet seriously usable.
...
It also suffers from a licensing problem: it uses libart, which is licensed under the LGPL, which (for some reason) means it can't be included as standard in mozilla builds.
There is also an Adobe plugin, which does claim to work with mozilla, but it crashes more often than not
I have always liked vector imaging, being able to export it as a raster image or keep it as a vector to be resized and manipulated easily.
After all, complex 3D models rendered for video presentations, simulations and movies are just complex vectors and can allow easy and proportional scaling.
Not to mention that most vector data compresses alot more than storing a high resolution raster image.
I am all for an open/portable format thats compatable from CAD programs through rendering/moddeling software and raster paint packages. Postscript can do some of this but I find postscript a little too bloated in alot of cases..
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
Other posts in this thread have listed some disadvantages of SVG, but omitted that a browser plug-in fully implementing the spec weighs in at several megs. This is in contrast to the Flash player, which is still under 500K in the latest version. Not an issue for broadband users, but they are still a minority in the Web world.
no, but Adobe LiveMotion does
Not mentioned anywhere by anyone so far: should we trust Macromedia's plug-in? One reason I don't allow the Flash plug-in to be installed on my computer is that I don't understand everything that it does, and how an author can mis-use the language to do things they shouldn't. Paranoid? Of course.
So I did a search here on the CERT site to see the kinds of headaches that have been reported with Flash. The returned response shows that the plug-in isn't too awful, but still it is bad enough to tilt the scales in my case to not supporting Flash at all, on any platform. YMMV
The same search of the CERT size for "svg" didn't yield anything, but that just means no one has found the hole yet, if there is one. Separating SVG and the multimedia functions means less opportunity for screwing up, or at least confining the exposure of any screwup. Maybe.
Besides, I have yet to find any good use of Flash as a customer -- but then again, I'm a proponent that Web pages should inform, not entertain or mesmorize. Corporate America won't like my attitude, I'm sure.
the current main svg players are closed source.
there is nothing stopping you from writing your own flash player. The flash 6 file format specification is avaliable at:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/open/lice nsing/fileformat/
the issues you have seme to do with the implimentation of the technology, and not the technology itseld.
Flash is also fine for interface elements, static elements, elearning applications, multimedia applications, etc.
Again, people can create what they want with any technology. It's not the fault of the technology. Sure Flash Intros are annoying. Guess what, SVG intros will be annoying too.
Why is Macromedia a "big, stinky corporation"? Thanks.
The big deal for me as a web designer is that SVG can be embedded directly in an XHTML document. The graphics eat less bandwidth than raster formats (like JPG and GIF) and can be mixed on-screen with the rest of the XHTML document. SWF files are subject to the usual limitations of anything implemented in a plugin.
Additionally, SVG animations tend to be smaller than SWF animations. It's like the difference between MPEG (which reduces redundant data from frame to frame) and using a separate JPEG image for each frame.