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Second Annual SVG Open Conference

Posted by timothy on from the lines-and-angles dept.

michael bolger points to this announcement that "SchemaSoft and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will host the 2nd annual SVG Open Conference on Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) in Vancouver, British Columbia from July 13-18, 2003 at the Westin Bayshore Resort & Marina. The SVG Open 2003 Conference and Exhibition is a forum for software developers, Web developers, graphic artists and other technical specialists to exchange ideas, methods and advances related to Web graphics."

20 comments

  1. Flash? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


    Why would someone wait for SVG when they can use Flash today?

    1. Re:Flash? by Sithgunner · · Score: 5, Informative

      From what I understand, SVG is superior to flash because,

      1. Not only human, but machines(web robots etc) can read information on graphical content of a web page if SVG is used, because the file is presented in a human readable file as xml text file, opposed to flash delivered in binary format which you can only know what it is by loading it on specific applications.

      2. File size is notably smaller compared to images presented as a binary format, because the rules of the graphic/animation is written as a text file. Although if you embed an existing image file, that will make the entire SVG bigger than just lines of xml code, of course.

      3. SVG is an open and standardized format, so many applications may adopt the format(Editor, viewer, converter etc).

      4. After all, it's XML :) Interoperability, it has.

    2. Re:Flash? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      5. Flash is evil. (When was the last time you saw a banner ad with blinking graphics and audio that was done in SVG? =P)

    3. Re:Flash? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      so true... i disabled my flash plugin for that very reason.

    4. Re:Flash? by WasterDave · · Score: 2, Informative

      SVG exposes it's object hierarchy to the web pages' scripting engine. Ahhh, the DOM or something, I'm not really cool enough for all that. So anything that can be scripted on a web page, can be scripted onto an SVG.

      Last time I looked Adobe had some pretty clever SVG demos, but last time I looked was about mid 2000 and widescale support for SVG has conspicuously failed to appear.

      Laa laa laa, Betamax vs VHS, NextStep vs Windows, Objective-C vs Java .... you know the score.

      Dave

      --
      I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
    5. Re:Flash? by Chelloveck · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I've been using SVG as a good intermediate format, much like you would PPM in the raster world. I've been having to transmogrify Adobe Illustrator files into something that can be imported to a printed circuit board layout program. The file gets saved as a bitmap (to flatten it; haven't figured out how to flatten it in the vector domain), autotraced into SVG, and then run through a Perl script to convert beziers to line segments and output it in PCAD's file format. I chose SVG simply because it's more-or-less human-readable and still very easy to parse programatically.

      It's a nice format, but I'm afraid it'll lose out to Flash on the web. It'll have a fighting chance if the major browsers would support SVG natively.

      --
      Chelloveck
      I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
  2. 5 days? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Is it really possible to spend five days talking about an image format no one has ever used?
    Day 1: Has anyone used it yet?
    Day 2: Why hasn't anyone used it yet?
    Day 3: You got any svgs? Nope, you?
    Day 4: Foosball
    Day 5: Hangover recovery

    1. Re:5 days? by waffle+zero · · Score: 4, Informative
      Is it really possible to spend five days talking about an image format no one has ever used?

      BuddyZoo has a nice use for SVG, you may have heard of it somewhere. I don't like the Adobe SVG Viewer but the Apache Software Foundation's Batik project is good for turning SVG into a nice (albiet big) PNG.

      java -jar batik-rasterizer.jar FILE.svg

      Although you might have to futz around with the svg code generated by to get it to work with Batik. Run it through an XML validator to see what I mean. (There is top level <svg> but two closing </svg> so delete the one that isn't at the end.)

  3. Version of Adobe SVG plugin by jpkunst · · Score: 1

    It sure would be nice if Adobe would release an updated version of their SVG plugin. The current one, 3.0, is from November 2001. The Linux version is still beta 1.

    Or does anyone know of other ways to render SVG in the browser besides the Adobe plugin?

    JP

    1. Re:Version of Adobe SVG plugin by Sithgunner · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure if it can be a browser plugin, but there is also a SVG viewer from Corel.

    2. Re:Version of Adobe SVG plugin by jpkunst · · Score: 1

      Thank you. I understand that it's a browser plugin, but unfortunately it's Windows only and I can't find anything at their site about planned support of other operating systems. (I'm on Mac OS X.) Still, it's good to know that there is some competition for Adobe in this regard.

      JP

  4. useless for me... by Naikrovek · · Score: 1

    ... until it works with mozilla.

    i just downloaded and installed adobe's svg viewer. (why the hell doesn't it work in mozilla natively, or at least be made available as a plugin?) it doesn't work. click a link, tell it to open the SVG file, about three dialog boxes pop up giving me errors.

    so i save the file to my desktop, and launch from there. same three error boxes coming up telling me to save it to disk and launch it from there.

    so i look in the start menu for this mysterious program and use the open dialog from there. well there is no start menu item.

    so for me, for now, and most likely forever, flash is how i will prefer to view my vector art, thank you.

    maybe you should hammer out the most very basic usability problems until you decide to start promoting this technology. ok?

    1. Re:useless for me... by kruntiform · · Score: 1

      The Adobe viewer seems to work fine in my Mozilla browser, Phoenix 0.5 (er, Firebird that is, as it's now known.) I don't remember if I had to do anything special to install it or not -- probably had to copy some DLLs to the plugin directory.

  5. sodipodi, and librsvg by oliverthered · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sodipodi is a general purpose vector drawing application which uses a subset of W3C SVG as its file format. It uses an advanced imaging engine, with antialised display, apha transparency, and vector fonts.

    librsvg


    The leading free SVG renderer for Unix.

    --
    thank God the internet isn't a human right.
  6. SVG is extremely cool by robj · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We implemented an interactive drag-and-drop drawing tool using the Adobe SVG plugin. It's frankly amazing to drag things around as though you were in Visio (connection points and all), yet to be doing it just by updating the DOM of the drawing itself. Developing with SVG is incredibly fast.

    SVG is enormously more useful than many realize. It's also one of those technologies that's not going away... it'll take a while for everyone to learn just how good it is, but once they do, watch out!

    Cheers!

  7. Re:Flash?-Get your fingers out of my ears. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Laa laa laa, Betamax vs VHS, NextStep vs Windows, Objective-C vs Java .... you know the score.
    "

    Laa laa laa yourself. Betamax is still used commercially. NextStep morphed into MacOSX. The same with Objective C. Of course anyone who constructs a sentence with "last time I looked" should be taken with a block of salt. I suggest you look again, and harder this time.

    [Chellovek]
    Kind of interesting you say it will lose out to Flash, when Macromedia was one of the many companies that was part of the development process of Flash.

  8. No, 6 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    July 13-18 is six days.