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: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.

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.