Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Gets (Beta) Native SVG support
Rushuru writes "Mozilla is getting a beta native SVG support. Previously one had to use 3rd party plugins such as that from Adobe, and they only worked on windows. SVG is similar in scope to Flash, but it is a W3 recommendation (i.e. a standard) and uses an open format. The project page has more info."
Website examples?
What's wrong with static, text and jpgs only pages?
BOO! TERRO
It was only a few hours ago I was reading a post in another slashdot article that was asking for SVG support in browsers looks like his prayers were answered
Since you have come this far, you probably already know that SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics
No, actually I just clicked the link...
--
SVG in combination is more like Flash, not just SVG. SVG does not have any animation capabilities.
*Finally*, I can start saying SVG is going to be supported natively in a browser, and pushing through projects on that basis.
..."
Until now, I've had to say you can use IE, then get an addon from Adobe. "What? Why doesn't MS support this SVG thing natively? What if Adobe decides to drop support for SVG; then what happens?
This is the best news I've read on Slashdot for a while
Is this going to be made a part of Mozilla Firebird too? I hope not, because wasn't the whole point of Phoenix to avoid all of these extra "features" and just make a fast, no-frills browser? This is hardly a critical feature since as was noted above few, if any other than the demonstration type, websites are using it, I don't think I want to see it if anyone does use it, and since there's no problem with a Flash plugin being an optional download, I don't see what the problem is with having SVG an optional download as well. Yeah, SVG is technically a W3C standard, but it's hardly a standard in actual web development.
You could already have seen some of SVG through the mozilla-bonobo plugin. As this plugin actually activates Eye Of Gnome for the image viewing, and EOG is actually more of a pixel-graphics viewer that happens to read SVG through the (still lagging) librsvg, the capacities are limited though.
For instance, you can only view SVG images as object tags, and complex stuff (like copied/ rotated graphics) aren't rendered well. (And it just so happens that Sodipodi produces SVG with a lot of copied/ rotated objects.)
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
If this SVG patch became fully useable for displaying animation, and then you could convince a really popular animation site (say, HSR) to switch to SVG and recommend a switch to Mozilla for native support... well, then, open source could rule the world.
~
If you need me, I'll be hanging my computer from the
and yet people still use IE. As a web designer, I have to ask, "WHY!?"
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
I do, however, pray thay SVG isn't included into standard mozilla (or any other browser) until it's reached maturity (which its page indicates it's pretty far from). I spend too much of my time working around the half-assed CSS implementations of older netscape and IE browsers, and I don't want another decade of worrying about which part of the SVG standard was implemented buggily (sp?) by which version of which browser.
I'm all for beta releases, developer's builds, etc., as the team needs as much feedback from as full an SVG authoring community as it can. But as soon as someone starts authoring sites that depend on the weird vagaries of one browser or another's SVG misimplementation, we'll be going down a painfull bug-for-bug compatibility road. Caveat.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
How about providing GTK2 builds by default so we don't have to muck about recompiling each time. It takes so Loonngg I wana cry! Anyway Apple and KDE are killing Mozillas market share on the Unix desktop so they only have gnome and obsure wm users to compete with, which is like 5% of all linux users.
... that is threatening the IE empire ;-) :o)
-SLK
So if it's by default in mozille (firebird), it might finally push SVG ... and make it what it is supposed to be, a webstandard.
;-)
I think it's unlikely to become commonly used until it's in Internet Explorer, because, like it or not, the number of people using IE is still vastly greater than the number of people using Mozilla and variants. Until it's in IE, I think most web developers will just say, "Why not keep using Flash?" and do just that. It's a similar situation with PNG; even though PNG-32 has superior alpha channel support to GIF, you don't see many sites with variable transparency 32-bit PNGs because IE still doesn't support them.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see Flash (and all proprietary web formats, etc.) disappear today and be replaced by SVG, but I just don't think that's likely to happen in the near future. Actually, I think I'd love to see Flash disappear today and not be replaced by anything, but maybe that's just me.
Bonus: All the images in the above galleries are Open Source, unless otherwise stated! (Quite literally, because SVG files are like "source code" for a vector image.)
As for SVG creating and editing software, apart from the new dSVG software announced earlier today on Slashdot, we have:
(Get your easy installable RPMs for Batik, and many other Java projects, at jpackage - but good luck finding a download link that works! Batik 1.5 hadn't propagated to all the Sourceforge mirrors when I tried it last night - so try all the US mirrors, it will be on at least one of them. Also, because of the numerous dependencies, it's recommended to use a smart package manager that can automatically resolve dependencies, like apt-get or urpmi.)
Female Prison Rape in NY
This might be a bit off topic, but I want to use SVG for data visualization and have been having trouble finding suitable software.
The SVG implementations I've found so far either have no external user interface with nice things like scrollbars (Adobe/Corel) or can't handle my very large graphics (everything else I've seen).
I've been very disappointed about this lack of good viewers. SVG is well-suited for data visualization and could become a "killer app" with the right software support.
Amen. I don't hold out much hope for this though, doesn't Mozilla already include support for CSS 3 selectors, even though that specification hasn't been finished yet? CSS 3 properties, I have no problem with, as they properly hide them with a -moz- prefix, but you just can't do this with selectors, and the Mozilla developers seem to have just ignored this problem.
Previously one had to use 3rd party plugins such as that from Adobe, and they only worked on windows.
/ main.html
The Adobe plug-in works fine on MacOS 9 and MacOS X.
There are even betas for Red Hat Linux and Solaris 8, though I have no idea how they fare.
Check:
http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install
Ok SVG is trying to be like Flash in scope, but i don't see anything besides animation. I see nothing about syncing with audio or adding interactive elements.
Are these possible and am i missing something from the svg documents? Or is it not there and there going to be a another super set of standards that uses SVG for the graphics and links with audio and has some scripting functions for interactivty?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
This is untrue as the plugin crashed in Windows. The release notes have noted this all along. Only a seperate build(branch) of Moz had native SVG support.
I see a RPM for Redhat 7.1 (gee, up to date), but no straight tar.gz. The link on mozilla.org is broken.
What happened to it?
Female Prison Rape in NY
The SWF Format for flash movies is open, anyone can write programs with SWF output. Unfortunetaly I don't have a link at hand for documentation, but there are several programs with SWF output. I think that SWF has a major advantage over SVG, which is file size. The SVG XML format wastes plenty of bandwidth. Don't misunderstand me, XML and SVG are still very nice things, and I'm more than happy to see the news here, just wanted to point these things out.
This sig is stolen from someone who had a much better idea than I had.
SVGmaker gallery
Kevin Lindsey
Adobe examples
Andreas Neumann's Vienna GIS example
(1) While I agree with some
:(
...)
posters that there is a danger of distributing unfinishend
implementations, having a NATIVE SVG is a real breakthrough though.
Quote: "Mozilla can handle documents that contain SVG, MathML, XHTML,
SMIL, etc. all mixed together in the same 'compound' document.... ".
Means for instance that you can simply add a little vector graphic INTO
your XHTML code instead of importing png. Also means that the same
DOM/Ecma interface can be used to program dynamic websites, or that you
can dynamically transform XML contents into XHTML/SVG with XSLT
client-side on the fly...
(2) On another note: Adobe's Plug-in version 6.0 BETA is available. And
it does not crash Mozilla 1.4 (Win2k) when embedded in HTML. In order
to install it with Mozilla (tested with Moz 1.4/Win2k) you must copy
the 2 files from:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\SVG Viewer 6.0\Plugins\*
to c:\Program Files\Mozilla.org\Mozilla\Plugins\ Did not see any Unix
version
http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/beta.html
PS: Plugin v3.0 kills Moz 1.4 (and others if you don't use iframes)
(3) There are some really cool SVG sites. My favorites:
http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/
(cool examples)
http://www.protocol7.com/svg-wiki/
(documentation about obscuret extensions,
i.e. shows how to get/post to URLS from within SVG
- K
Well in that case, /. should post articles that we need world peace and stuff like that.
This is the example I always use to impress people of SVG's capabilities (like convincing my boss of using it instead of Flash) :-) n a
http://www.karto.ethz.ch/neumann/cartography/vien
A lot of useful information here: http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Overview.htm8
I don't need a signature.
If you'll read the page you'll see "SVG is not switched on by default in official Mozilla builds". It's been this way for months. I believe there are some legal problems, IIRC they're using a GPL'ed library to do the rendering or something.
Anybody here ever considered to push out a RFC for:
OSML - Operation System Markup Language !
OSML is a markup language which describes entire operating systems. A OSML capable browser can run any existing operationg system just by processing the approriate OSML files.
Well, you could do the same by TMML (Turing Machine Markup Language), but I have some doubt that people would use it.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I just want to point out that Flash is an open format - you can download the specs from Macromedia.
.swf files) and its scripting language is quite powerful.
/.-ers hate it so much. Just because it's not GNU/Flash?
I think SVG is very promising, but Flash already is available for 95% of the computers. It's reasonably fast, extremely compact (both the plugin and the
What I don't understand is why so many
While on the topic of "SVG/SMIL != Flash" (or is, whatever), see also here. Though it is a book promotion website, there are lots of comprehensive examples on SVG, scripting SVG through Javascript (similar to simple Flash buttons) and combining SVG with SMIL.
That is, the W3C website says the link is also about SMIL. I'm still looking for that link.
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
It seem like just yesterday, in all the dSVG posts, people were complaing about just how weak
SVG support was and its back-burner status in Mozilla .
Native support is great, everything else is just a hack.
I for one am so excited to see this news!
So maybe I'm just a web Luddite who wants plain old text and images, but if the Mozilla developers manage to put default SVG support in Firebird while keeping it small and fast it'll be a good thing, even if it's still a while before we see widespread use of SVG. As long as there's a runtime option to turn it off. ;-)
If so, the license issue has been fixed?
This article got mentioned in another thread and I read it and rather enjoyed it. Recommended.
Yeah, besides, Flash is a standard, it just happens to be a defacto standard.
;)
I'm waiting for someone to start a "Burn all Flashes" website
I sig for world peace
Correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't a series of graphic routines for javascript be far more useful? I mean you can dynamically create JS like any other content but also JS can directly interact with the user without interacting with the server.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
A plugin should be sent mouse and keyboard events and be given an API to use to draw things into a "window" defined by the browser, and perhaps an API to retrieve data via an URL, and that's it. Mozilla might get that part right. But the plugin should also run in its own address space, so that if it decides to crash or otherwise do something stupid it won't take the browser with it. Mozilla definitely does not get that right.
Mozilla needs to be stable even in the face of crappy plugins. Right now, it's not, and that's something that badly needs to change.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Last I heard, maybe they were going to support the static SVG mini-spec or something. I'd be surprised if they dropped the policy of not including half baked implementations now.
There are no free software authoring environments. Flash is open as long as you have the Flash program, or maybe SWiSH, all of which are proprietary and mostly expensive.
People hate Flash for many reasons. The one that stands out for me is that it just doesn't work right. I'm used to tabbing through links on a page. I'm used to middle-clicking to open in a new window. I'm used to right-clicking and getting a useful set of options. I'm used to my browser remaining quiet, instead of blaring out music over the top of whatever I am already listening to.
There are a hundred different ways in which it doesn't work right. Flash just doesn't fit well with the web. It's a good format for presentation, or for HSR-style sites, but for everyday interaction with the web, it's terrible. However, many web developers haven't actually realised this, and litter the web with monstrosities that give Flash a bad name.
I think of Flash as being in the same boat as Java applets. In certain circumstances, they can be the best tool for the job. But using them as part of a website's infrastructure, as opposed to merely being something that is on a website, is virtually always a mistake.
Seems like if the Open Source community would be better off improving Ming .swf file generator. Flash is good, and I don't see the need for adding to the Tower of Babel when a good standard with hooks to Open Source exists.
Why not back Flash and put the effort in improving Open Source support of Flash???
HenryJamesFeltus.com
Is this going to be made a part of Mozilla Firebird too? I hope not, because wasn't the whole point of Phoenix to avoid all of these extra "features" and just make a fast, no-frills browser?
You just can't please some people. If you want a fast, no-frills browser, use lynx. If you're using an OS browser, then I'm sure you can compile it without SVG support; see how it works??
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Flash (and SVG) are extremely powerful and obviously people can abuse the way they work on the web. Remember when people used to put rainbow dividers on web pages? We didn't outlaw 256 color GIFs! Without Flash (or SVG) there would be no way to mathematically create plots from data on the client-side. This is an extremely useful feature. I have a project where I'm tasked with generating plots - I could do it on the server side but this would require clunky Apache graphics plugins and negotiation with my web host. Plus they would download much more slowly and come at a fixed resolution. By plotting client side using XML data - I just create new XML files when I need to make a new graph. See examples here: http://www.spies.com/~gus/forests/soiltemperatures /
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
As one of the mozilla SVG developers I find it a bit funny that a user creating a freshmeat site to stash their copy of a mozilla svg build is slashdot news. there are daily win32 builds ( from both the trunk and branch SVG trees) posted to ftp.mozilla.org and about monthly linux ( RH7.1) tar.gz. and have been since mozilla 1.0
There is still no agreement to make SVG part of the base GRE install, the current effort is to re-merge the SVG devel branch back to the trunk
dave
My understanding that there was also a licence incompatibility issue wrt libart. I'd guess that's not an issue for the GDI+ win32 build, but has the libart licence issue been resolved?
Last I heard, maybe they were going to support the static SVG mini-spec or something.
The maturity level of both mozilla svg and some of the others (I'm most familiar with batik) shows that everyone seems to have most of the static features down; it's the dynamic features that (unsurprisingly) have lots of work yet to do. The SVG spec describes a static subset, as you say - they call it "Conforming Static SVG Viewers". The strategy you describe is exactly the smart thing everyone should be doing - getting the static stuff perfect and out there. As a web developer I can cope with two levels of SVG support (static and dynamic) particularly as the feature string is exposed in the DOM.
I'd be surprised if they dropped the policy of not including half baked implementations now.
I wish IE had the same policy.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
Yes, this is an example of where Flash is used as part of the content, rather than part of the infrastructure. The huge backlash against Flash is due in part to people using Flash to do navbars and so on.
I am a mere Blue Collar worker in a small town in Georgia, USA. I shall endeavor to persevere in my efforts to read and write the American language...
HenryJamesFeltus.com
From the SVG project page: "Last modified: Tue Mar 4 07:27:13 GMT 2003"
I mean, yes, SVG is terribly exciting and all, but Mozilla has had these SVG builds for a loooong time now (and development, while continuing, isn't exactly very swift, so don't expect to see this in regular builds anywhere in the near future).
The only real "news" here is that it's now mentioned on freshmeat.
Still, publicity good I think. If anyone wants to give Mozilla a hand with making this better...
There are numerous problems with Flash, and SVG has the potential to solve all of them. Many people hate Flash so much because of the countless sites that have been rendered unreadable and unusable by gratuitous use of Flash.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Another possibility is SMIL.
SMIL will also be required if anybody wants to synchronize sound with SVG animation. This is necessary if SVG wants to compete with Flash. How long will it be before a web browser supports both SVG and SMIL well?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Mozilla.org has already refuted allowing it be distributed by default in the bug which allowed libart to be checked in to the tree under the other-licenses/ directory of the cvs repository. The reasoning was that Mozilla sources are released under the MPL and the extra license could potentially cause extra headaches for distributors (as far as ensuring compliance with them, keeping track of them, etc.). Additionally, there are already enough licenses for distributors to deal with, and Mozilla.org should be looking to decrease that number, not increase it.
Flash does weigh in a little heavy in the cost arena but it is has been dropping in the past few years.
Swish is 50 dollars which I dare say "CHEAP" and while Swish does not do all that flash does, you can do a hell of a lot with it. I own swish and use it when I need to be quick and dirty, but then again I use it a lot more that my owned copy of flash these days, as most of my animations are lite weight.
As for free software flash operating enviroments. Well they did open up the specification to the world, now they are supposed to release their commercial content creator for free. Write one your self, or check Source Forge, there are many projects out there.
Sometimes companies have to sell things to get something called money to support research and innovation.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
So blame the developer, don't blame the tool.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
So make one. The file format is open. Figure it out and make an open source, free Flash development suite that can work in windows and linux. make everyone happy.
or maybe it is just easier to complain about it.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
I tried Windows SVG_20020806_BRANCH/GDI+ just now, and pointed it at text-text-BE-01 in the 'mozillified' W3C SVG conformance suite at http://www.croczilla.com/svg/fosdem2003/w3c-confor mance-suite/mozillified-suite.html.
Mozilla crashes when it encounters that, both on an NT4 SP6 machine, and newer OS.
Mind you, SVG text is also a challenge for Adobe's viewer (v3) - if you try to view a multipage textual document, Adobe's viewer only displays the first page, and gets the kerning wrong, running words together.
IIRC from when i tried it a month or 2 ago, Corel's did a better job with SVG text, but right now, i can't get Corel's viewer to run properly anywhere :(
Bottom line:- you'll likely be disappointed if you are looking to display SVG text in a web browser today
... why downloading a plugin for Flash is easier than downloading a plugin for SVG (for IE; or not download anything for Mozilla at all)
No Native Jpeg 2000 Support yet. :(
SVG is actually much broader in scope than Flash, PDF, or other proprietary formats, as aptly pointed out by Paul Presod at SVG Open 2003.
Furthermore, the XML project of the Apache Software Founcation is hard at work on Batik, a Java-based toolkit for applications or applets that want to use images in the SVG format.
A lawyer & digital forensics examiner. Also an expert on open source software (OSS).
Many people hate Flash so much because of the countless sites that have been rendered unreadable and unusable by gratuitous use of Flash.
My 2 cents guesses that we will be seeing the same thing with SVG. A change in format does not guarantee a change in content quality.
They're adding more features in a browser that can't even do copy n paste correctly?i d=206764
Good f***ing grief.
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?
I've been waiting/looking out for for something like this.
t ml)
So I see it's w3 approved, so where can I get something to draw and convert files?
(other than http://www.adobe.com/svg/demos/devtrack/svgdraw.h
A blog I run for the wealth
Mozilla.org's had SVG-enabled builds for about 2 years now.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I would make one, but I'm busy with other stuff, and Sodipodi meets all my needs.
Can someone tell me how this is new?
Mozilla SVG builds have been available for over a year now (That's just a guess, I haven't actually checked dates). Has someone picked up the slack and is working on it again?
Have they solved the drawing api licensing problems?
Oh, agreed. But at least with SVG, we'll be able to resize text, middle click links and navigate properly, for example.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I do a lot of Actionscript-heavy Flash stuff, and I really don't see SVG as an alternative for much of that. Flash has lots of features that are good for things OTHER than animation, and the players are pretty consistent across platforms (since they all come from Macromedia).
On the other hand, I could definitely see SVG being a big winner for animated banner ads and the like, as well as for more useful stuff like data visualization.
I think Flash has more or less become what Macromedia originally hoped Director/Shockwave would be for the web.
SVG could become a more useful version of what Flash started out as (and what a lot of people still use it for).
This Like That - fun with words!
SVG is much more than a competitor to Flash or other proprietary formats.
A lawyer & digital forensics examiner. Also an expert on open source software (OSS).
If it is like Flash then there better be a way to block it, just like banner ads (which is about the only thing flash is used for these days). It is easy to remove the Flash plugin, but how will I remove SVG??
> ...wouldn't a series of graphic routines for javascript be far more useful?
No need.
XML-DOM + SVG namespace = pretty much what you're asking for.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Rushuru messed up when saying "Mozilla Gets (Beta) Native SVG support". This Croczilla effort hasn't changed much in a very long time. Even its main page, which Rushuru linked to, hasn't had any edits in the last few months:
Last modified: Tue Mar 4 07:27:13 GMT 2003
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/
All these opinions here on Slashdot, based on so little connection to reality -- sheesh.
SVG? WTF? Why are they wasting their time with irrelevant crap like this when there are fundamental pain-in-the-ass bugs in Mozilla which need fixing? I'm thinking here of its retarded inability to sort bookmarks, which they've been avoiding fixing for what seems like years and is the reason I use Opera instead of Moz.
Oh, I forgot - it's far more fun to add exciting new features than to fix bugs.
There isn't native Flash support in any web browser; it's always through a plugin, and plugins never integrate nicely with the browser's normal behavior. Just to be extra annoying, there's no well-publicized external Flash viewer to use outside of the browser, either.
It also gets undeserved flak due to web designers who think that an animation makes a good web site, and it's relatively hard to do alternative renderings of Flash (with SVG, you have some hope of getting the navigation information out and letting people use the site without watching the animation).
A while back there we rumours of Microsoft buying Macromedia. There's your answer. They can close the format, may the Flash plug-in incompatible with your favorite browser, . We all benefit from truly open standards.
If you want mozilla with SVG, and you're using gentoo, you can just add mozsvg to your use variable, and re-emerge mozilla.
What I don't understand is why so many /.-ers hate it so much. Just because it's not GNU/Flash?
As far as I'm concerned, GNU, SchmeeNU (or GNU, Schmnoo).
I hate Flash because so many webdesigners think it's an alternative to HTML. Navigating through poorly-designed Flash-based websites when the Flash offers no advantage over HTML is very annoying. Look ma, I can reimplement scrollbars! Except that mine look so much cooler, except that you don't need to click, but you can't choose how fast you want to scroll, it's slow as hell or nothing!
And SVG beats Flash because it can be mixed into the same page as HTML so everything works normally, except it's a better kind of normal.
Look out!
Besides there being a Freshmeat posting of a beta, has any particular milestone been reached in Mozilla/SVG development? I was able to compile and use SVG on Linux for a while already, and SVG-enabled builds have been available periodically. The netscape.public.mozilla.svg newsgroup does not have particularly much to say about status -- in fact, Alex Fritze, the primary programmer behind the effort, posted the following on July 16: "IMO Mozilla SVG is still too immature for inclusion in default builds. What we really need is more C++ developers working on SVG code. The problem is not so much the technology as the man-power. Any volunteers welcome!" Additionally, the last time the Mozilla SVG project page was updated was 3 months ago. I am a big fan of SVG and am impressed by Mr. Fritze's efforts, but I am wondering what the expectations are for when Mozilla SVG will be enabled by default.
Just d/l'ed svg-mozilla. It's saying "...svg-xml (Scalable Vector Graphics), Mozilla does not know how to handle ..." when I try to view something. Same goes for "(image/xml+svg)".
What am I missing here?
Eric
Has anyone ever used IBM's SVG View? How is it?
Phillip
All plugins I know of are separate entities from the rest of the page. Only Flash on IE can do transparency.
There is an advantage in supporting XML-based plugin specifications that can somehow interface with the rest of the HTML tags/CSS through the main rendering engine. That was Microsoft's idea with HTML+TIME, their implementation of SMIL.
BTW, IE also has an SVG-like vector drawing engine built in. It's pretty useful for reporting.
http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-VML
However, time has shown that as far as cross platform goes, it's easier to use the existing plugin system (EMBED tags).
Do you still have to shut down and hand edit a configuration file to set the user agent? One thing that KDE and opera do well is allow you to specify what user agent string your browser will send a particular web site. This is probably the only reason I don't use galeon or Mozilla (although I have off the shelf builds from SUSE 8.0 at home).
Woohoo. More redundancy, more bloat. Less content. I'm beginning to hate all web browsers. BTW, Slashdot is acting really wierd lately. The posting pages are only half-rendered on Mozilla 1.4.
Yes, but isn't SVG just markup on the page? Sure the server can dynamically feed diff SVG markup but once the page is loaded isn't it over?
Even if you could document.body.blah.svg.line1 = "blah" via JS wouldn't
document.draw.circle(x,y,r,color)
be easier? At the very least circle, line, rect, bitblt and such should be in the JS api.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
As someone said, flash and animated gifs can be abused in all sorts of ways, and no doubt that with SVG we'll see the same happening if it ever becomes mainstream.
It appears that many people want SVG as a kind of Flash replacement. I've been waiting for general SVG acceptance for some time, but not for animations. I want it for maps, charts, and logos.
For example, Mapquest puts out lovely maps in GIF format, but they'd be a lot more useful to me if they were in SVG so that my 600 DPI printer could clearly render all the street names, rather than being locked into a format at 72 DPI. (They could use PDF for that, and I'm not entirely sure why they don't. Too expensive, either computationally or financially?)
Charts and logos would be a lot nicer given in SVG than GIF or JPEG. Again, that's most important when I intend to print it, but it's also useful for something where I'd like to zoom in to get the details.
A pet peeve: I see many corporate documents intended for printing where the logos obviously came from a web site, because they're blocky and ugly. It looks amateurish, but it can be very difficult to get a high-res version of an image. You can't incorporate a PDF into your word-processing documents, and EPS support is very spotty.
So I'm really looking forward to SVG. I just hope there's a button to turn off all the stupid animations. I use Firebird with an extension that requires a separate click to activate a Flash animation. That makes many web pages a far more pleasant experience. Yay SVG, boo Flash/Shockwave.
Hmm. Maybe we could trick RMS into doing that and leaving the Kernel guys alone. That way he does something good for the world and we get Linux 2.6 earlier.
Personally, I'm thankful we have ANY integrated, fairly easy to acquire, vector studio (I say studio because flash does much more than animation) on the web. SVG sounds like it will be top-notch when it's finished, but until then I'm glad to have Flash. Bottom line: Less talk, more coding. SVG is infantile at best.
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/0 7/18/2229256&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=156
:)
There was a few requests in there for mozilla support of SVG
Since SVG is an XML application, it works well with CSS, XSL, DOM, and JavaScript. Many good drawing programs already output SVG, it's adding the organization and intelligence to the document which is harder. IMHO, the O'Reilly book SVG Essentials is one of the better books for interested self-starters.
My father is a blogger.
"Depends. Does X-Smiles count as a web browser? :-)"
As I pointed out in the last article. Try browsing the web and you'll see. Anyway some replies were pointing out that Adobe upgraded it's plugin. That's nice but it's still for windows. Anyway it's good that Mozilla is getting off it's can and doing something about SVG. Wonder if their MathML support is doing as well?
> Even if you could document.body.blah.svg.line1 = "blah" via JS wouldn't document.draw.circle(x,y,r,color) be easier? At the very least circle, line, rect, bitblt and such should be in the JS api.
Nup. That's what DOM is for, and it's language-neutral. Why would you want to encumber JavaScript with additional objects or methods that are peculiar to a specific host environment?
Of course, you're free to build up your own API in JavaScript (or any other language that implements DOM) using createElement(), setAttribute(), appendChild(), etc. if you wish.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
First, being able to download the specs does not make the format "open". An open format is defined in an open, relatively transparent process with input from multiple players including vendors and end-users. As long as Macromedia maintains sole control over the direction of the specification, it is not open. You can also download specs for the Word .DOC format.
Second, you cannot download the specs without agreeing to a license agreement. The license agreement is specifically designed to allow you to create SWF files but not to create a viewer. Macromedia has not sued anyone who created a viewer but that's because nobody has done a good enough job to compete with them seriously. Imagine if an open source product competed so well that more people wanted the open source version than the Macromedia version. First, they could sue. Then, they could change the format to make the open source version obsolete. That's why Flash is not an open format.
If Macromedia wants it to be open it should remove the licensing agreement and say that the specification is in the public domain for anybody to do anything with it.
SVG and Flash are like JPEG and GIF. They are optimized for different uses, with some overlap.
Just as JPEG is best for photos and GIF is best for illustrations, Flash is best for banner ads and cartoons while SVG is best for business graphics.
Here are some reasons to use SVG instead of Flash:
While i am sure hundres of folks are saying yay somethng new and pretty for mozilla, I say boo hiss, because I see annoying floating adds cruising accross the text of an article I want to read. I see websites with "original" navigation schemes that make no sense. Of course if no body uses SVG then this was all just a waste of time.
I started using Moz to avoid this shit that kept happening in IE and stayed with it because it works (and tabbed brousing rules)
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
The grandparent post said write valid XHTML. Last time I checked, all the current versions of the big browsers display XHTML with good to great CSS and DOM support.
Frankly, if you're using a browser less than IE version 5.0 or Netscape 6.0, you shouldn't expect modern websites to render appropriately. The days of client-sniffing javascript in order to display in Netscape 2.0 are over, or haven't you been reading Zeldman?
Of course, I wouldn't take a job with a shit scope like that. Nor would I be caught dead working for a flamebaiting anonymous blowhard like you.
My father is a blogger.
The funny thing in this whole Flash vs SVG debate is that no one apparently has read the authors list of which Macromedia is there. Not to mention the other big names. As far as SWF, it's free as in beer, not speech.
Good news for open source applications like Sodipodi, Sketch and Scribus, which all have SVG support.
This means open source drawing and publishing applications will have a file format which is open, scriptable, XML based and can display on the web and print well.
"So blame the developer, don't blame the tool."
Double standard here.
When Flash is abused, it's the developers fault. The rest of the community is doing it right.
When a developer catorers to majority IE, and tells everyone else "go fly a kite, you follow my defacto standards, not I yours" then it's the rest of the web development communities fault for not falling in line.i.e Someone's comment awhile back about Mozilla not succeeding if it doesn't copy IE bugs, and all.
When are we going to see a working linux version of SVG?
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Mozilla is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Mozilla community when IDC confirmed that Mozilla market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all web browsers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Mozilla has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Mozilla is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Mozilla's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Mozilla faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Mozilla because Mozilla is dying. Things are looking very bad for Mozilla. As many of us are already aware, Mozilla continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Netscape 7 is the most endangered of them all, having lost 100% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant firing of all 50 Netscape developers by AOL only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Mozilla is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Mozilla.org leader Mitchell Baker states that there are 7000 users of Mozilla. How many users of Thunderbird are there? Let's see. The number of Mozilla versus Thunderbird posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Thunderbird users. Camino posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Thunderbird posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Camino. A recent article put Netscape 7 at about 80 percent of the Mozilla market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Netscape 7 users. This is consistent with the number of Netscape 7 usenet posts.
Netscape went out of business and will probably be taken over by AOL who sell another troubled browser. Now AOL is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Mozilla has steadily declined in market share. Mozilla is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Mozilla is to survive at all it will be among browser dilettante dabblers. Mozilla continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Mozilla is dead.
Fact: Mozilla is dying
The most promising SVG editor looks to be Sodipodi. There's a small but active development community grown up around it, and its pretty easy to get involved and help add to it. Work is under way to modularize a few pieces - libnr (a new SVG renderer to replace libart in Sodipodi), libcroco (a CSS library), and a new effort aimed at breaking out Sodipodi's SVG drawing canvas into something reusable.
One direction I'd love to see Sodipodi go is to gain additional technical drawing capabilities, so that it could be used for things that Dia isn't quite up to - like diagrams that need an artistic flair to them.
Not just that, many, many, many websites are going Flash-ONLY, and many of the designs aren't very good either, and its name says it all 'Flash', nothing but being flashy.
They say it in 'full function and glory' when referring to Flash menus, but they take longer, and reloads everytime to move back or forth. Or worse, still, drops you right in front of a 2-hour Flash intro (Okey, I just kidding here) with a miniscule 'skip-into' button.
I would have hoped that using Flash, the menus would be able to dynamically fit into my browser window (reasonably sized), but they just force me to widen the window to fill up the whole window, sometimes even worse (and I am using 1280x1024, resolution too, so it has nothing to do with lack of my computer screen's resolution).
Now you would, say, 'Is Flash to blame for all this?'
No!, but those who think they can hide their incompetence behind flashy intors and menus. Flash has it's rightful, uses, not to convert the whole navigation and accessing method for all the websites in the world.
Again, I think flash can cut the size, but Flash webpage designers more than counter this advantage with more flash, making it even worse than image-hack based pages.
Flash is just isn't worth the computing acrobatics that go on when going into Flash content based page.
Pardon me, I am rambling...
Now don't argue that you can do the same with SVG and SMIL, because I am not arguing that point. I am telling you why Flash is annoying. It is not just because it is not GNU/Flash.
Actually, is quite the opposite. Slashdotters have modded you up because of this particular line.
What does that say?
It says that Slashdotters do not hate Flash just because it is not GNU/Flash.
On the contrary, it is rather the misuse of Flash that irritates most Slashdotters, and this irritation is often perceived as hatred for Flash itself.
As an endnote, I should say that all that I have said doesn't make any difference. Flash will thrive and people like myself will suffer. But who am I? No one. So who cares, when 99.9% of their users are willing to put up with it. I probably wouldn't if I were like them. But I am just saying this because you used that cliche 'GNU/' which is the equivalent of the 'n' word.
To sum it up, what I have been saying so far is nothing but bloody nonsense.
Thank you for understanding
GrimReality
2003-07-20 18:14:59 UTC (2003-07-20 14:14:59 EDT)
I just want to point out that Flash is an open format - you can download the specs from Macromedia.
reading the Specification License Agreement it does not seem so "open" to me
Check out my answer to that:
4 85 706
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=71668&cid=6
I don't think these numerous problems are problems at all.
There's numerous people that misuse HTML/javascript/css/... but there we rarely blame the formats...? What's so different about Flash?
stfu nigger
I agree with those points... however, you don't need the spec to reverse engineer swf's to make a proper player, no sueing involved, and the format seems clean enough from what I saw of it.
It's not open, but it's better than the alternative: SVG is just too complex to create a useful implementation (ie that can compete with SWF) at this point in time.
The problem with the (albeit open) W3C specs, is that they reek of "design by committee".
It's not because it's open that it's automatically "good"
I see some people ask: Why not just use Flash - it's an open standard?!
To that I ask: What is your definition of an open standard? When talking about open standards, it's important to have the definitions clear! I believe there exists lots of different opinions on what an open standard is!
I also believe it is important to know the difference between an open specification and an open standard! An open standard is also developed openly - an open specification isn't neccesarily. PDF is an open specification, so is Flash. In many cases, an open specification is fine though, but it is (AFAIK) exactly what many people have complained about in regards to Java.
An open standard must (IMO, though I'm not sure I can remember everything) be freely available, free to implement and developed openly.
Flash is an open specification (according to what others say) - what about SVG? Well, I believe there is some companies that have som patents that covers at least part of SVG and could claim RAND royalties. In other words, SVG isn't an open standard either...
I use SodiPodi (http://sodipodi.sf.net i think). It's a wonderful tool.
There's no double-standard. Only a small group of isolated pear-shaped loudmouths that believe that they are SAVING THE INTARWEB by quoting standards documents like a bunch anally-fixed nazis. Everyone else uses the tools that are deployed.
Mainly that while Flash is great for the developer, it sucks for the end user. It results in slow page display and is actually used as a tool of annoyance by certain web sites - consider Yahoo for instance. They pop up Flash ads on top of the text on the web page frequently. Your choices for stopping this are:
Mind you, Flash even takes over the client area (just try right-clicking on a Flash popup and trying to 'reject popups'...right). In short, Flash is about the most end-user unfriendly implementation that can be imagined.
You wonder why developers like it but the end-user hates it? It has nothing to do with OSS/proprietary. Flash can and will die for these reasons.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
You should have read the page linked. There's a link to a pre-compiled SVG-enabled GNU/Linux binary on the page.
It even includes instructions to build it from source.
There is a very good reason not to use Flash, and it is very simple.
.SWFs.
.SWF so you can manipulate the source in all kinds of ways), and is living (the W3C team will actually listen and respond to your suggestions).
SVG is not Flash, and it doesn't do the same kinds of jobs. Oh, sure, anything you want to do in Flash could be accomplished in SVG, but if you want to do piddly kiddy animations and such, you're probably better off using
SVG, on the other hand, is XML based, which means you can do data driven graphics with it in a snap. Hook a little XSLT to an XML exporting database and you have a reusable, generic graphing tool which can be deployed on a web page and doesn't require spawning processes left right and centre.
The spec is Open (as well as merely open), is text based (unlike
Microsoft's Visio team has implemented support for it, Corel has recently released a more designer oriented tool (Smart Graphics Studio), and Adobe has been pushing SVG quietly for ages now.
In conclusion, SVG is not Flash. It isn't competing with Flash, and when you see an SVG document with HTML, movies, and yes, even Flash embedded in it (you can do two of the three so far) then you'll begin to understand the power and flexibility of SVG for real day to day use.
Cheers,
-pvh
Institute of Ocean Sciences
"The wise man proportions his belief to the evidence." -- David Hume
An open standard to provide embedded
video and sound as well as a decent programming
language is badly missing. SVG does not address
all needs yet but it is a good start. Mostly
needed are good sound and movie import abilities.
Here, Flash is unchallenged. Its compression
abilities are remarkable and that will be an issue
with SVG. It is good news that SVG will be
implemented by default into browsers like Mozilla.
That will give SVG a boost.
Flash is only a temporary alternative for me as
long it is not possible to author it decently on
an open operating system (it is of course possible to
do it using vmware on linux) and without a guarantee that
this product will continue to exist. There were
countless examples of implementations for sound
or graphics for the web which died and we have no guarantee
that Flash will exist in 10 year unless the entire Flash story
becomes an open standard (not only file formats like swf).
For web developers on Linux, command line tools like
avi2swf movie.avi movie.swf
wav2swf sound.wav sound.swf
svg2swf graphics.svg graphics.swf
will already be a good start besides already existing exports of
simple presentations like in open-office. But lets face it,
these are tiny subsets of the possibilities Flash offers now,
especially with the action script programming language which
is quite nice.
OK, I got the new Mozilla SVG enabled browser and I go to this page and click on the logos and up pops the dialog saying I've got an SVG mime-type file and it asks if I want to say or use an applicaiton.
Where's the part where you get to render the SVG in Mozilla?
Just to be extra annoying, there's no well-publicized external Flash viewer to use outside of the browser, either.
Doesn't everyone use IrfanView? Ok, it's not well-publicized, but it's so good that it doesn't have to be.
Recently, in a move that could eventually put SVG in mainstream usage, the OASIS Open Office XML File Format TC voted to "merge" the office suite file specification with the W3C SVG spec.
.NET juggernaut, but it's not likely to be either cross platform, inter operable, or integration friendly. Which is like saying the Microsoft collaborative environment will be fundamentally Internet adverse, only working within the boundaries of the XP Stack.
Based on the OpenOffice.org XML file specification, the current spec includes svg as used within the context of compound documents. "Merging" OOo XML with W3C SVG would mean a consistent model for naming elements, attributes, and actions, as the two specifications forge ahead into the future.
So why is this important? For SVG to reach critical mass it needs to be broadly "used". Gone are the days when any corporate entity, other than Microsoft, can reasonably expect to reach critical mass with a proprietary format. What Macromedia did with Flash is unlikely to happen again. It was the Flash plugin to Netscape that opened up the mass svg consumption channel, which is what was needed for Macromedia to corral and focus a new generation of graphical web developers. And even though Macromedia has met the new market realities of open source and open standards by opening swf and cloning JavaScript, an iron grip on the Flash core fla format absolutely guarantees the invasion of SVG into the graphical web application space. A deal with Microsoft could change things. Rumors abound. But Chairman Bill is holding all the cards. He can choose to ride the SVG wave, picking and choosing the date and time when Adobe, Corel, and Macromedia will be put to rest. Or, he can financially embrace the fla format, and change the rules of the game tomorrow. Either way though, the game of graphical web applications seems destined to turn on whichever contender reaches mass user "engagement" at the lowest level.
There's much to be said for creating next generation rich client side environments that collaborative web application developers can target. But for any rich client environment proposal to garner a critical mass of developers, there must be the certainty of promise that a critical mass of users hosting the basic components of a rich client side environment exists.
For sure there are many early pioneers, like Altio and Curl, trying to get some traction in this emerging market space. They at least have gotten enough attention that the big guys, those with considerable "deployment", and proven client side relationships, have joined the chase. Macromedia has it's "collaborative" graphical web proposal based on some 350 million Flash players sitting in rich client environments. Adobe is charging forward with a PDF based Acrobat model promising to make the full Adobe suite of graphical applications an integrated environment. Sun is finally getting serious about putting a rich target Java environment down on the desktop, the problems with swing not withstanding. Corel is pouring everything they've got into open standards, hoping to ride the fourth wave back to prominence. Microsoft has an incredibly rich environment brewing in the XP Stack and
The OOo community vehemently argues that OOo.org and Mozilla.org create an environment as rich a graphical developers target as is out there. They take the challenge of the XP Stack model so seriously that recently both a server side component (OpenGroupware.org) and a client side Outlook alternative (the Glow Project) were introduced. It's not enough for OOo.org to challenge Microsoft as an office productivity suite. All aspects of the XP stack model must be countered by an Open Stack alternative if users are to truly have a choice regarding the next generation of collaborative computing.
The OOo UNO universal network object interface model has been optimized for both Java and Python. Can XUL be far behind?
Putting SVG at the core of the Open Office XML file format offers SVG d
Is when Flash blocking is available and on by default in the default install.
Everything else...well, who gives a shit?
I love SVG. We have already used it in one application. It is so nice to be able to generate graphs and charts dynamically at runtime by merely generating some XML code. But it needs an installed base of players. How did Flash become so prevalent? Because graphics artists knew that Macromedia had endeavored to get IE and Netscape to bundle Flash players with >90% of all browsers.
I do not consider SVG to be bloat at all. In a Web standards based browser, it is the W3 analog to PNG and JPEG decoders.
Stop, (ab)using the, comma. You, sound like, Captain, Kirk.
... you can get an SVG enabled Mozilla by setting "mozsvg" in your USE settings. It's not documented, but it's there.
He has a point - whereas the Flash/SWF format internalises has native support for animation (via both ActionScript, Macromedia's semi-ECMA-compliant scripting language, and frame-based or 'tweened' animation), SVG requires the inclusion of a section - this does to me seem more similar to the use of clientside scripting on (X|HT)ML pages to create animated effects, than to a technology specifically designed for animation (such as Flash). How exactly is the parent trolling??
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This is cool, but I'd like to see an option to turn both SVG and Flash elements off. So that they wouldn't even be downloaded. Firebird/Mozilla already offers the option to turn off both Java and Javascript, why not also add SVG, Flash, and maybe even all image files. You can already choose to block the images from a particular ad server, but now those servers just send a Flash animated ad instead. It basically backfires on you because you end up seeing a much more obnoxious animated Flash ad.
So the W3C proves itself worthless again...they completely ignore a widely used web technology (Flash), and even leave the embed tag out of their DTDs (strict and transitional), but they jump right on top of a technology that's used in just a fraction of sites on the web.
How can something be a "standard" when it's not really the "standard" tool for vector graphics on the web???
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
If Mozilla can't render svg files (yet), what's up with the --enable-svg and MOZ_INTERNAL_LIBART_LGPL flags upon compilation?
There's numerous people that misuse HTML/javascript/css/... but there we rarely blame the formats...? What's so different about Flash?
Because it's a really well-implemented, close-sourced, not-free (as in cash) program/scripting language that's the best in the industry. That's a very bitter pill for a lot of people around here to swallow. Unfortunately, it's true. There's just so much functionality, speed, and extensability in Flash that unless Macromedia seriously drops the ball, no one is going to catch up. I wish everyone who used Flash had the skills of Praystation and the like; unfortunately like any tool, it takes practice and skill to master, and in the wrong hands can be seriously misused.
If you're just a OSS zealot, I can understand disliking Flash. But bashing its feature-set is just childish, particularly since there's nothing else out there that can do half of what it does.
Uh, you are taking one person's comment about IE as what all web developers think. sorry, but that would be incorrect.
As with Flash, a website that doesn't work in all browsers is the developer's fault. Many of us believe in using things such as flash correctly, and coding to standards. don't assume one voice speaks for all.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
And one of the advantages of flash is that it has multiple, mature authoring environments. sure, all of them cost something, but its not like the only way to develop flash is to put money into Macromedia's wallet.
the people i work for have no problem in spending a bit of money here so that i can develop flash-type stuff in a proven, stable environment whose output can be viewed by over 90% of the browsers out there.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.