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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."
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
SVG is a great format for reporting. A much cleaner & potentially more interactive way of displaying complex data than just "static, text and jpgs". Check out the adobe SVG site (http://www.adobe.com/svg), they have some great examples.
And yes, people will use it as a flash wannabe. But that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned - moving from a semi-proprietary format (I know the flash format is *kinda* open) to a standards based format - and XML based, no less.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
"What's wrong with static, text and jpgs only pages?"
Yeah, I agree totally. That's why I read the newspaper.
*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
mozilla svg samples
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.
There's nothing inherently wrong with the technology just because some people will use it for stupid things.
... get one that looks good on screen and also prints well, instead of the horrible blocky printed crap you get with GIF/JPG.
Your post was stupid, but I don't think we should abolish the alphabet because of it.
Some things are better represented in vector graphics and this can be a great tool for that type of thing. Why waste bandwidth transmitting the same map over and over (for different zooms) when you could just get one that is zoomable on the client end? Need a printable diagram
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]
It being an open format might help gaining acceptance, as happened with .png (although some popular commercial browsers have flakey support).
It's going to be a long, long struggle against the de facto industry standard, even though projects like sodipodi might help it.
Not everyone understands why following standards is important. The countless broken pages I've seen because somebody decided that using JavaScript was much cooler than using HTML that actually worked... Also, I've seen many companies giving up on flash sites in favor of a simple (but OK looking) HTML-based site that works. I guess the success of the standard depends less on the technology than to the way it is applied.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
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
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
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 ##
and yet people still use IE. As a web designer, I have to ask, "WHY!?"
Simple: because people are fucking lazy ! They get their IE with their Windows, and they are just too lazy to download and install Mozilla or Opera (and they don't care about them since every web designer/developer out there supports IE with their web pages).
If someone visits my homepage with IE the background is replaced with simply white since IE can't handle transparent PNGs and a red warning box is diplayed explaining that IE is just not able to correctly display my homepage (while Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror do).
If more web-pages would do this people would finally think, but this will take some months. MicroSoft gladly doesn't want to update IE any more, so people have to wait for the next Windows to get an update to IE, which is due in 2005 I think. Lots of time which could make a difference if the other browser developers and web designers/developers use that time. And features like good SVG support could really be that difference (and tabs, and blocking of JavaScript pop-ups, and ...).
IE is out of date just now, but people don't care about this, that's the propblem...
Because:
I'm a web developer too, and I hate having to deal with Internet Explorer too, but end-user inertia isn't something to dismiss as "people being stupid". You have to give them a reason to care enough to put effort into switching browsers.
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
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
The real problem is that coders that develop for IE rarely check how pages work in anything else while decent developers check not only Mozilla but also IE and often Opera, Lynx, Konquerer, and whatever else they can get their hands on. Therefore IE users always have the best browsing experience.
;)
I suggest anybody developing not-for-profit sites to simply save themselves the trouble and not make any special effort to support IE. Code to the standards. If IE can still show your page then great. If not then let the users know IE sucks - put a 'Works best with Mozilla.' button on your page to link to where users can download Mozilla. Circa 1997 gimmicks still work.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
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.
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.
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
SVG is really much, much more than a vector based image format though; it's an entire animation/effects plugin which will work seamlessly with current standards such as XHTML, MathML, CSS, and JavaScript (ECMAScript if you wish to be technical).
Adobe has already placed some very nice demos of embedding SVG within standard web pages. Take a look at some of the things that can be done with it, and you'll quickly see how the SVG standard can
As far as the extra size in download goes, most people have to download Acrobat Reader to read PDF files, which are very common on the web. If SVG ever achieves the same status, I will be very encouraged as a web designer.
Now, if they would only get X3D in order...
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.
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
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
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
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
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).
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.
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