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."

Comments

Re:Does anybody actually do anything in SVG?

[pen]

mozilla svg samples

Re:SVG/Flash

[andrewl6097]

Err...no. From the article:

SVG is similar in scope to Macromedia's proprietary Flash technology: among other things it offers anti-aliased rendering, pattern and gradient fills, sophisticated filter-effects, clipping to arbitrary paths, text and animations.

mozilla-bonobo

[Pflipp]

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.)

SVG test images and SVG apps

[greenrd]

After you've downloaded you can test your new SVG-enabled mozilla build by checking out these galleries (see links on left of page). The thumbnails are ordinary bitmap images but they are linked to SVGs.

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:

• Apache Batik for all you Java people. This is a fairly mature library (I believe it's based off the CSIRO library), plus sample apps like a viewer, a rasteriser (i.e. convert to gif, jpeg, etc.), a font converter, and a pretty-printer. Quotage: "With Batik, you can manipulate SVG documents anywhere Java is available. You can also use the various Batik modules to generate, manipulate, transcode and search SVG images in your applications or applets." Batik, according to its test suite, supports all of the static SVG specification (i.e. static images) and some of the dynamic specification (i.e. animations and scripting).

  (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.)

• Sodipodi, [screenshots] a GNOME SVG drawing app, currently at version 0.32. It hosts the open source SVG image gallery linked to above.

• For more, including KDE/Konq support for SVG, see this Wiki page

Adobe SVG plug-in not windows-only

[Oniros]

Previously one had to use 3rd party plugins such as that from Adobe, and they only worked on windows.

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/ main.html

Re:Question.

[JimDabell]

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.

I don't know why everybody has latched onto SVG == open Flash. SVG is just vector graphics. SMIL is closer to Flash in terms of functionality.

SVG Examples

[wombatmobile]

Website examples?

SVGmaker gallery
Kevin Lindsey
Adobe examples
Andreas Neumann's Vienna GIS example

Re:Bandwith eating useless animations

[jd142]

I would assume that just like Mozilla let's you block graphics it will eventually let you turn off svg's. I also just found out about the flash blocker,
Flash Cick to View. It's part of the Firebird extensions but also works great on plain mozilla 1.4 if you get it from the author's page.

With no popups, no ads and no flash, the web is usable.

Mozilla has had SVG for ages

[Daa]

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

SVG is much more than a competitor to Flash

[Paul Bain]

SVG is similar in scope to Flash, but it is a W3 recommendation (i.e. a standard) and uses an open format.

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.

Re:SVG for data visualization

[rockmuelle]

SVG has a long way to go before it will be suitable for data visualization. Most real world visualizations are based on large datasets and require a certain degree of interactivity. Both of these are possible using SVG. However, coding up an interactive application using JavaScript and the DOM model favored by the SVG designers is a non-trivial task.

A typical data set may contain 10,000 or more elements (e.g. financial analysis, temperature/forcast data, usage stats for a medium size web site, marketing data for a product line). Immediately, this requires a DOM tree with at least that many nodes. Given that each node requires a certain amout of meta-data and a containment heirarchy, the amount of data that needs to be transferred between the client/server, parsed, and managed in the browser grows quickly.

Ignoring the physical challeges of using DOM, there is also an abstraction challenge: Not all data fits nicely into the tree/scene-graph paradigm embraced by SVG. Of course, data can be transformed to use this model, but manipulating the data will be much more challenging.

Assuming a suitable DOM representation of the data exists, the next challenge is developing the JavaScript to allow the user to explore and manipulate the data. With no real package support and no built-in way to manage a large code base, JavaScript is not the ideal language for developing reusable vis code.

Before data visualization becomes commonplace in SVG browsers, another abstraction will need to be built on SVG that addresses the specific needs of the data vis community. This could be in the form of libraries that abstract the SVG frameworks with data vis APIs or another XML dialect that can be transformed into SVG.

I'm holding out hope that the SVG community will slow down on the feature creep and architecture bloat and focus on developing applications with the currect standard. Only by stepping back and trying to use the current system will the architects of SVG know what's missing and what needs improvement.

-Chris