Slashdot Mirror
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.
SWF - Propietary format, but easy to make via wizards and so forth for the 16 year old web designer in your neighborhood. Flash 5/MX easily warezed which nullifies some cost concerns fro the less scrupulous. Well known.
SVG - Free format, but requires a foreknowledge of XML. Well supported by the mobile industry and some pretty heavy hitters, but not particularily known by the public.
Will both be implemented equally or will one ever edge out the other? Are we really going to have to suffer through Flash for much longer?
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...
Scalable Vector Graphics -- since it uses formulas (XML entities, really) for specifying where lines and shapes go instead of specifying location per-pixel, filesize will be small. Don't worry about XML verbosity preventing this, as SVG-files often are compressed.
The availability of libraries as Batik makes SVG-generation flexible and easy. One example: One project I was on concentrated on pulling numbers out of a database and visualising them as a graph. Filling a XML-document with values and applying XSLT we had instant SVG. Upside: Very scalable and interactive (our customer was very fond of "hotspots" on the graph). Downside: Lack of plugins. Fortunately, it was for their intranet.
As to impact, I do hope this catches on. I much prefer coding Java + SVG than Flash, if just for the fact that not having the Flash-plugin doesn't prevent my regular development with SVG.
Flash Player for Linux (Obvious)
Flash Usability (Flazoom!)
SWF Extractor (Windows prgrams that extracts images and mp3 files from a SWF file as separate files)
Unlock SWF (Open up compressed SWF files)
SWiSH (Low cost alternative to Macromedia)
How to Download YouTube Videos
OpenSWF.org has the
documents.
SWF is the file format used by Macromedia Flash to deliver graphics, animation and sound over the Internet. Almost 95% of web users can view SWF content without having to install a new plug-in, and over 300 million people have downloaded the Flash player. Macromedia published the specifications for SWF in April 1998
Looks like Mozilla has a project to supoort SVG The Mozilla SVG Project.
While we are still a long way away from full SVG support, the subset currently implemented is already pretty useable. We have support for all basic shapes including beziers, stroking and filling with opacity and much of the DOM.
The samples at croczilla.com/svg/ should give you a good idea of the features currently implemented.
Big areas where we're still lacking include text, clipping, filters and declarative animations.
I'm a .NET programmer so I personally used the component from this page, which includes a brief introduction on SVGs, however in general SVGs represent the benefits of vector graphics over raster/bitmapped graphics (smaller size, print better, and scale better). It's unfortunate that everyone can only see SVGs as competition to Flash (I see SVGs as competitions to GIFs and PNGs personally), however it should be noted that it is a virtual certainty that Microsoft will include native SVG support in the next Internet Explorer. Overnight SVG will become the premiere vector format despite all the Flash kiddies ranting on about how "open" Flash is (these must be the same people who call Java open).
In other words, if you're looking to create a cartoon on the web with nice tools and full multimedia synchronization then take a look at Flash and its tools today, but if you want to add vector graphics to a corporate intranet and so, definitely look at SVGs. One of the biggest features of SVGs that got me interested in the first place was the ability to completely embed the graphic in the webpage: While this goes against the spirt of HTML, this composite page was a godsend for a site which allowed users to email or download single file (i.e. non-zipped) reports.
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
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.
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
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.
SVG has wide usability and even popularity in tasks far beyond Flash's ability. For instance SVG is the standard display format for geographical applications. SVG is used for some scalable KDE icons. SVG can be natively produced using open source software on open source operating systems. SVG is going to be embedded in the next generation of cell phones. SVG is going to be embedded in upcoming printers as a page description language. It is possible to print to SVG as you might print to Postscript or PDF. It is also possible to directly render PDF to SVG. And you will soon be able to output Visio diagrams as SVG. I've even heard of an SVG front-end for NetHack.
The point is that SVG can achieve popularity much greater than Flash's without displacing a single Flash animation. And once it has done that, it will be a small additional step to wipe Macromedia's proprietary, binary crap off of the face of the earth. ;)
By all means, use Flash for the time being. It is the best tool for many jobs. But don't think that SVG is a "theory." It is used by thousands of people in practice, in both commercial and open source projects. There are many businesses dedicated to building SVG tools, and whole industries being re-imagined around SVG. Its recent growth curve is amazing and I'm convinced it will be remembered as being as important as other major W3C specs such as XML and HTML before it.
As someone who is a regular on SVG lists for the past 7 months or so (not very long), I have already come across SVG book authors, W3C members, and Macromedia employees, and good ol' developers all having the very same debate that know the technology much better. And, surprise(!), no side has given up and said "Oh, you're right, lets start developing only with X." If you checked a 2 page SVG vs Flash demo and reposted some generic "SVG doesn't have as many authoring tools", although valid, it's a lot deeper than that. SVG is XML. A real W3C standard. Anyone can make their own client, and hopefully get around cross platform issues like HTML browsers. Which shouldn't be too bad, an SVG plugin is less of a commitment than your whole browser, and bad XML is just that, hopefully no "close enough" rendering. You can create SVG with XSLT or through any server side scripts that can output plaintext.
n t_replay.html
Here are some great places for SVG demos:
Pinkjuice/svg
KevLinDev
Adobe SVG zone
And here are some SVG examples more "in the wild", which are usually mapping or graphing:
http://www.netency.com/netenmap/index.php?p=demos
http://www.oaklandtracks.com/noise/noise_manageme
Anyway, educate yourself and see where SVG can be applied. Good luck.
Every time Flash comes up in a Slashdot thread, there's always some poster who hasn't heard of Flash MX saying "It doesn't support search engines, Unicode, accessibility, or the back button." The MX version has been out about a year now -- isn't it time to update your talking points?
"It doesn't degrade if you browser isn't able to support it." And that browser would be -- what, Lynx? Which also lacks SVG support, and always will.
As for "the majority of the Web browsing public," that's a very mild way of saying that the Flash plug-in is (according to Macromedia) the most pervasive software in the world, with over half a billion users. Given that Flash MX has strong XML support, and that it's now targeting "rich Internet applications" instead of ordinary vector animation, SVG has a long uphill battle ahead.