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Second Annual SVG Open Conference
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."
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.
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.
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.)
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.
.... you know the score.
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
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
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.