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.

Re:Bandwith eating useless animations

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing inherently wrong with the technology just because some people will use it for stupid things.

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 ... get one that looks good on screen and also prints well, instead of the horrible blocky printed crap you get with GIF/JPG.

Plotting against Microsoft

[NoTildeQuestionMark]

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.

~

include it in the standard build - when it's done

[wfmcwalter]

SVG is a brilliant standard, and will go a long way to replace the web's millions of opaque flash and shockwave animations (and any number of "diagram" gifs) with something standard and accessible. I'm exceptionally frustrated that I can't realistically author mission-critical sites with SVG as a major (or even the entire) component.

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.

Re:Yet another mozilla advantage over IE

[DarkDust]

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...

SVG Examples

[wombatmobile]

Website examples?

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

Native vs. non-native SVG

[KasparS]

(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

Re:Firebird

[jacksonyee]

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

• Replace large graphics with smaller XML code and custom effects
• Replace most of what Flash is: a proprietary language for interactive vector animation. The newer versions of Flash have some very nice extras, but for the most part, SVG can really dig into Macromedia's space if it's adopted by people other than just geeks, and being backed by Adobe is a very good sign.
• Allow accessibility within stylized content. Very few Flash animations on the web nowadays have any type of accessible content.

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...

Open Standards: SVG vs Flash

[gaspyy]

I just want to point out that Flash is an open format - you can download the specs from Macromedia.

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 .swf files) and its scripting language is quite powerful.

What I don't understand is why so many /.-ers hate it so much. Just because it's not GNU/Flash?

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

Re:At last!

[snillfisk]

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? ..."

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).