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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?
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.
I know this is a troll, but I'll bite.
.eps or something; I'm not even sure if it handles animation and I don't think it can embed sound events.
SVG is often takes much less room than the equivalent jpg/png/gif. It has great potential to eliminate the need for a lot of crappy graphics hacks used out there. For example, once easy-to-script graphing libraries are available, you will be able to make svg graphs of real-time data (of web activity, stock prices, etc.) instead of using bitmaps. For much data, this will be much smaller and more aesthetically pleasing. Some large interesting background images etc. will be possible because they are not constrained by the actual size of the image, just the detail. Although svg is being compared to Flash, it is really more proper to think of it as an embeddable
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.
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
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.
(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
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!
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.
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
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 ##
The real problem is that coders that develop for IE rarely check how pages work in anything else
.9 or thereabouts, that by coding to Mozilla, you will get a page that will work in pretty much every major browser. Granted, I'm not doing anything that fancy, just dynamic pages built from php/mysql that use javascript to manipulate the dynamic elements based on user choices. Since the DOM (at least the elements I use) is the same for mozilla, ie, konqueror (which means it should work for Macs now) and Opera, I don't have to worry about building browser detection in the scripts.
Which I've always found to be a bizarre way of doing things. I've found that ever since Mozilla
Because Mozilla is stricter about coding, you'll get better written code. IE let's the developer be sloppy, which produces sloppy pages. Mozilla is more strict, which forces me to produce better code.
Yes but most SVG binaries from the trunk were very unstable, I can't remember having one build that didn't crash my win2k...
In General:
Native SVG for me as webdeveloper very important because of the DOM access which is hardly exsisting in the plugin version of Adobe.
All these nice techniques are only interesting if we (the developers) have a way to change things at runtime in webpages.
SVG (together with a lot propriarity namespaces (not closed though due to the nature of xml))is extensively used by Illustrator.
Sorrowly, this has already happened; Adobe hasn't updated their plugin since 2001 and is lacking support for everything newer than the 1.0 standard. The most promising plugin at the moment is with no doubt the Corel SVG Viewer which looks and handles really neat. We've tried the mozilla native support in earlier editions (mainly about ~3 months ago) and the implementation was currently very lacking of needed features.
One point I would like to make; the first plugin (or browser) to support the upcoming SVG 1.2 standard is going to get a quite instant userbase, the interest for SVG is only growing -- something which SVG Open just showed (I was a coauthor for one of the papers, Distributed GML Management with SVG Tools).
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.
"What? Why doesn't MS support this SVG thing natively?"
Microsoft and Macromedia are business partners.
SVG is a potential threat to Flash*.
Do the math.
* Macromedia is ideally positioned to become the premiere vendor of SVG tools, but may see security in a home-grown file format**, not unlike some of their business partners.
** At least Flash is largely open, unlike some of their business partners' formats.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
While I do agree that being lazy does factor in for many cases, I think fear of change is a pretty heavy influence as well. The perfect example is a forum I used to post on. Someone there was having problems with a couple pages in IE, and many of us suggested she try using Mozilla. She did, and reported being astonished by how much quicker it loaded a few pages that she read on a regular basis, liked the pop-up blocking and tabs, and was impressed by how many more useful features it had compared to IE. You'd think with all that praise she'd be using Mozilla from that point on. Instead, she used it just for the page which was giving her problems in IE. Her reason for not switching browsers, Mozilla was just too different from IE and 'people don't like change'.
And I think that's something I at least lose sight of. Most people love familiartiy more than they love the idea of improving most situations. And that's furthered by many, or even most people on average, not enjoying learning new things. We're presented with new options, and find it fun to play with them and learn what they do. Many others might just look at the new option, click it once, see information they're not familiar with, and dump the program because the writers are making changes to what the users consider their program. The person in the above example also would refer to Internet Explorer as "my internet explorer", and I think that's a telling statement. A lot of people also seem to view their computers like their couch, or chair. It's something they own, and which should always remain in a static state.
Everything will be taken away from you.